The Selected Poetry Of Keats – Edited by Paul de Man, 1966 ★★★★

The Long and Short of John Keats

Near his end, John Keats took a line from his hero Shakespeare: “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.”

         

Just as he was winding down one of literature’s greatest too-brief careers, Keats put pen to paper and wrote a poem about exactly that, not in anger or grief but rapt serenity. Considered one of the greatest poems in English, “To Autumn” is impossible to top as a swan-song:

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,–

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

That Keats wrote so well is amazing in itself; the journey of getting there almost as much so. To appreciate this short, wistful work of simple verse and charming rhyme requires the same kind of effort one exerts scanning more tedious fare. That is where a book like this one, The Selected Poetry Of Keats, comes in handy.

Not that early Keats was tedious. Just sometimes. Consider his 1817 stab at epic verse, “Endymion.”

“Endymion” tells the story of the title character, a “brain-sick shepherd-prince,” who leaves his bucolic home to chase after a goddess he caught sight of from his bower. He pursues her through the underworld and below the ocean floor, rescues another god, and finally forsakes his love for an Indian maiden who turns out to be the goddess after all.

Keats fills over 4,000 verses of poetry in consciously grand style, suggesting a fop with quill in one hand and Yorick’s skull in the other:

There, when new wonders ceased to float before,

And thoughts of self came on, how crude and sore

The journey homeward to habitual self!

A mad pursuing of the fog-born elf,

Whose flitting lantern, through rude nettle-briar,

Cheats us into a swamp, into a fire,

Into the bosom of a hated thing.

When published in Keats’ own lifetime, “Endymion” met with scathing denunciation. Keats’ style was herky-jerky, critics claimed. He was too free with his classical allusions. He didn’t have the clarity of vision to pull off an epic poem across four volumes.

John Keats, as painted by his friend Joseph Severn two years after Keats' death. Severn was at Keats' side in Rome when the poet died. The above hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Image from https://www.npg.org.uk/.

I think they were right. In an 1820 letter to Percy Bysshe Shelley, Keats described his mind as being “like a pack of scattered cards” during its composition. Keats regretted publishing “Endymion” but not writing it. He had some things he needed to say.

One important thing about “Endymion” was that it allowed Keats to make clear his commitment to classical forbears. These included not only the Greeks and Romans whose gods Keats preferred to Christ or Jehovah, but also writers of older times like Shakespeare and Milton.

In “Endymion,” Keats imagines the Muses of antiquity rolling up the scroll upon which the names of the “mighty poets” are recorded. “The world has done its duty,” he avers.

“Endymion” starts out with a great Keats line, “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,” a critical phrase in itself to understanding the poet. Much wonderful verse runs through it. But its thematic consistency becomes a weight. “Endymion” would give Keats a reputation for being excessively pastoral, or “bowery.” Sylphs glide from bosky shade to sunny dale, tripping lightly over vermeil lilacs as gentle waters lave the mossy marge.

To be fair, Keats is not always this bad. Sometimes he is worse. Keats’ other epic work, “Hyperion,” takes a dramatic situation, the fall of the Titans of Greek myth, and renders it into a series of moody pageants without conflict or resolution. The poem is much shorter than “Endymion,” as Keats gave up on it soon after Book One, but read right after “Endymion” the way it comes in The Selected Poems Of Keats, “Hyperion” tests your resolve even more if, like me, you aren’t a poetry connoisseur going in:

Then Thea spread abroad her trembling arms

Upon the precincts of this nest of pain,

And sidelong fixed her eyes on Saturn’s face:

There saw she direst strife; the supreme God

At war with all the frailty of grief,

Of rage, of fear, anxiety, revenge,

Remorse, spleen, hope, but most of all despair.

The Fall Of The Titans, a famous Dutch painting from 1590 by Cornelis van Haarlem, depicts the collapse of the cosmic hierarchy that preceded Zeus and Hera in Greek mythology. More than a century later, the episode was the subject of John Keats' "Hyperion." Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_of_the_Titans

In his 1966 introduction to this volume, Paul de Man of Cornell University explains the inclusion of “Endymion” and “Hyperion” on the basis of their importance to Keats. “Endymion,” he writes, is “indispensable for a reader interested in the workings of Keats’ mythological imagination.” This tack is understandable, but unfortunate.

By taking up over a third of the total page count, the epics obscure Keats’ shorter-form brilliance. Best known for “To Autumn” and other odes like “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” as well as the poems “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” and “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” Keats shines throughout this collection in his briefer bursts, there and in his lesser-known works as well.

“Welcome Joy” is a forthright declaration of Keats’ appreciation for life’s rich pageant, from the brim to the dregs. Rich in classical allusion but also natural imagery, it suggests “On Autumn” but with more of Keats’ own sensibility coming to the fore:

Nightshade with the woodbine kissing;

Serpents in red roses hissing;

Cleopatra regal-dressed

With the aspic at her breast;

Dancing music, music sad,

Both together, sane and mad…

Written in 1818, the last full year of Keats’ active career, “Welcome Joy” shows how he had grown as a writer. The phrasing is sharper, dynamic, more cohesive. Even if you don’t understand everything you read, Keats whets your appetite, and with that, deepens your engagement.

Even a return to the fragrant glades around Mount Olympus arrives with more pleasing, impactful effect. “Lamia,” finished in September 1819, the same month as “To Autumn,” tells the story of a serpent who is restored as a woman and then joins in love with a man, Lycius.

The Kiss Of The Enchantress, completed in 1890 by Isobel Lilian Gloag, was inspired by Keats' poem about Lamia. In the poem, Lamia is no slippery shape-shifter but a sincere lover undone by the suspicion of others. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamia 

Keats spends much time on setting the scene, but more urgently than before. Perhaps he knew his time was running out, though the tuberculous that would kill him did not manifest itself in earnest until the following year. More likely, he was sick of writing poetry for little money and much scorn, while simultaneously struggling to support his brother in America.

Whatever impelled Keats, “Lamia” takes us on a majestic journey. The transformation of Lamia from serpent to beautiful woman, “convulsed with scarlet pain,” is one of the most vivid descriptions in the whole book. Later we get to the moral of the story, perhaps not an odd one for someone who had studied medicine before ditching it for art:

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine –
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-personed Lamia melt into a shade.

As enjoyable as Keats is at his best, I found it more enriching to read poems like this and the elegant, extraordinarily brief “La Belle Dame sans Merci” after having trudged through the stubble plains of “Endymion.” I understand now what Keats meant when he said he had to write the longer poem, as it not only allowed him a way to flush out his imagination but discourse on themes which he could elaborate upon in later works, such as the importance of dreams and the link between truth and beauty, an idea which forms the famous conclusion of “Ode on a Grecian Urn:”

Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

“Grecian Urn” is in the third and final volume of Keats’ poetry to appear in his lifetime. By the time it did, in 1820, Keats had quit the business of poesy and would soon be off to Rome and a lingering death.

Critics did carp about the final book, and lines like the above continue to engage debate as to whether it lifts or sinks the rest of “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” yet the overall reaction from Keats’ contemporaries was positive, enough to make one wonder what would have become of Keats had he not died at 25. Could he have resumed his writing career under friendlier, haler circumstances?

One can only wish it had been so. His final known verses as they appear in Selected Poetry suggest a turn toward the personal. Keats the great romantic had actually fallen in love for what may have been the only time, to one Fanny Brawne. She loved him back, but his dire financial circumstances kept them apart until illness did the rest.

Keats and Fanny Brawne. Though he did profess an earlier romantic attachment, Fanny was the one he pledged his love to during his final years. "My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet," he wrote. Image from https://www.express.co.uk/expressyourself/139030/Keats-Fanny-A-fashionable-affair.

His struggles with jealousy in verse form offer both enchantment and engagement for those of us who know more about love’s failure than success, and ground his writing in a way that suggest the kind of brilliance that would have followed.

de Man’s introduction spends much time dissecting one of his last works, the sonnet/ode “To – ”:

Touch has a memory. O say, love, say

What can I do to kill it and be free

In my old liberty?

When every fair one that I saw was fair,

Enough to catch me in but half a snare,

Not keep me there…

“To – ,” de Man writes, is “what happens when this distance between the private self and its moral stance vanishes,” and offers a peek at the author of the more famous and bucolic “Ode to a Nightingale” when he is more keenly invested in what he writes about.

Is “To – ” the better poem? It is marvelous, to my mind as marvelous as “Nightingale” or other more famous Keats works. The great thing about Selected Poetry is the chance to read them all and decide for yourself.