After my reading of Sidney Colvin’s book on Keats, I took up
Amy Lowell’s book and read it with great interest and pleasure. And despite the
fact that it is over eleven-hundred pages in two volumes, it seldom flagged and
was always interesting. Amy Lowell was, of course, a poet in her own right and
was a cousin of the poet James Russell Lowell. The wealth of the Lowell family
gave Amy exceptional opportunities in research because she was able to purchase
a great deal of Keats material that other researchers would have had a
difficult time obtaining. However, her efforts in compiling the Keats story
were not all successful. Unfortunately, a great deal of Keats material,
including a number of important letters, were in the hands of the great
American photographer Fred Holland Day and, for reasons that remains obscure to
me, he would not share all of these materials with Lowell.
However, despite any challenges that Amy Lowell may have
faced in her bibliographic work, her massive two-volume book on Keats is still
a magnificent monument of work and, arguably, her greatest legacy.
The story of the life of Keats is a strange and terribly sad
one. Despite the numerous close and loyal friendships that John Keats enjoyed
during his tragically short life, I always think of him as a loner. I am not
certain what has given me this impression, but if I ever imagine a lonely
Romantic poet ruminating on the beauty of the world (a beauty that is
miraculously found despite the pain all around us), while standing in a sunny
spot of greenery or meandering with a mazy motion along a river’s quiet path,
it is Keats who appears in my mind’s eye. I suppose it is the nature of his
poetry that fosters this notion for me. Or perhaps, and conceptually much more
likely, it is what I bring to his particular style that paints this picture in
my head. Either way, the moments in his poetry that usually stand out during my
reading are those that speak to my sense of loneliness.
The thing that gave me a particularly poignant moment of
reflection on the issue of loneliness was something that Lowell quotes from
Keats’ early poem written to his bother George. The lines are these –
At times, ‘tis true,
I’ve felt relief from pain
When some bright
thought has darted through my brain:
Through all that day
I’ve felt a greater pleasure
Than if I’d brought to
light a hidden treasure.
As to my sonnets,
though none else should heed them,
I feel delighted,
still, that you should read them.
Most critics would probably say that these are by no means
among Keats’ best lines of poetry. They are, indeed, very sentimental and, for
the tastes of many, somewhat simplistic (what Blackwood’s Magazine would have probably said that these lines were
too much in the Cockney school of poetry). But regardless of the poetic
“quality” of the quote, there is, it seems to be, something deeply lonely about
these lines. Keats tells us that “at times” he has felt relief from pain; as
though these are only happy moments snatched from an otherwise difficult and
lonely life. And he cherishes these moments, as he tells us, like they are
hidden treasures. Then, giving us another picture of a lonely artist working in
isolation, he tells us that no one heeds his sonnets; but he is glad to at
least have his brother with whom to share his work.
I think this passage is particularly poignant to me because
of the close working relationship I had with my father. My dad and I practiced
art together for nearly thirty-five years and through many years of my doing my
artwork he was the only one who really understood what I was doing and what it
meant to me. So I really know what Keats means when he writes about the delight
that he experiences in the knowledge that he can share his Sonnets with George.
But, of course, now that I have lost my father I feel a pang of loneliness
where Keats felt a moment of delight. (Later, he would know this loneliness
again when George Keats moved to America) But I also appreciate those times
that are like a “relief from pain” when I have a moment of appreciative memorial
affection for my dad with whom I was able to share so many years of remarkable
closeness. Unfortunately these moments are all too brief because they are
overwhelmed by the darker melancholy that comes with the realization that I can
never regain the delight of sharing my work with my father.
Anyway, putting aside those rather maudlin thoughts, let’s
return to my overly Byronic vision of John Keats. The Byronic Hero is a lonely,
melancholic individual who is cynical, dark, and isolated from his or her
fellow humans. But, despite the image that always seems to rise in my mind,
Keats was not really Byronic in this sense at all. On the contrary, Keats was
widely known to be affable, warm-hearted, and decidedly un-cynical. But,
perhaps more importantly, Keats had many genuine friends. Amy Lowell tells us
this – “Taken as a whole, Keats’s life was painful. The bereavements of his
earlier, and the griefs of his later, life must have made it so. But we should
never forget that in these few years of his growing poetic talent he was
supremely happy, as happy as his passionate temperament allowed him to
be.”(Lowell Vol.1 – 49) Keats, then, was not a gloomy, Byronic Hero, but a
happy, and passionate visionary whose poetry grew out of something other than a
brooding spirit. Lowell goes on to tell us another important thing about Keats,
and that is that “he had a genius for friendship.” (ibid.) And this is
important, because thought Keats may have lonely, he was not a loner. People
were attracted to Keats because he had a “saving and joyous sense of humour,
and a fund of animal spirits.” (ibid) Despite my own impressions, Keats was a
social man who enjoyed the company of others.
But, of course,
given the historical impressions of Romanticism and Modernism, this vision of
broodiness is a simple mistake to make because it is easy, I think, as an
artist (particularly a Romantic one) to fall into a spiral of self-absorption.
This tendency is not necessarily a result of selfishness but can be simply the
result of intense self-exploration. Those familiar with literary history will
recall the remarkable essays of Michel de Montaigne. This 16th
century French writer and statesman practically invented the modern notion of
the occasional essay. Though few of his contemporaries understood the
importance of what Montaigne was doing we know in retrospect that he was
helping to create a modern notion of art. Montaigne famously claimed that “I am
the subject of my book,” and it was precisely this notion of self-exploration
in art that made him so modern. In an idea that was quite ahead of its time,
Montaigne thought that he could use his inner-life and his own experience as a
primary way of understanding the human condition. This idea became, of course,
a central motivation for the so-called Romantic authors who, in the absence of
a more traditional religious framework, turned their artistic eyes inward to
the most human landscape they could know – their own.
On the other hand, one may well argue that one of the
primary motives of all of poetry is the fear of being alone. Think of Odysseus’
powerful thirst to return to Ithica, or Rama’s search to bring home his beloved
Sita. Despite our image of the lone Romantic Poets, it seems clear that much of
our poetic spirit is motivated by a fear of loneliness. Such an idea reminds me
of the Ubi Sunt passage of the Anglo
Saxon poem “The Wanderer.”
Often (or always) I
had alone
to speak of my trouble
each morning before
dawn.
There is none now
living
to whom I dare
clearly speak
of my innermost
thoughts.
Or perhaps the
passage from Coleridge’s Fourth Part of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner –
Alone, alone, all, all
alone,
Alone on a wide wide
sea!
And never a saint took
pity on
My soul in agony.
Now, bringing this back to Keats, one gets the impression
upon reading his life story that while he used his inner life as a source of
philosophy and poetry, he also dreaded the loneliness that is, perhaps,
integral to the life of the artist. But as you read the events of his life you
realize that, though we are all in sense alone, Keats was blessed with great
friendships. We need only think of the painter Joseph Severn, the young painter
who agreed to accompany the dying poet to Italy in his final days in the vain
hope that the change of climate would stem the disease. Severn has sometimes
been criticized for having a clear idea of how sick Keats really was and for
going with him to Italy for his own selfish reasons of furthering his own
career in painting. But when you read his journal of the final weeks of Keats’
life you realize the sacrifices he made and the lengths to which he went to
comfort and care for his dying friend.
The slow decline and death of young Keats through the
body-ravishing disease of tuberculosis is a very difficult thing to read about.
Anyone who has nursed a dying loved-one has a sense of how devastating and
debilitating this process can be on both the ailing and the one who nurses him.
It was not that long ago that I was called upon to fulfill this role of
nursemaid to my father and it pained me beyond anything I can ever describe to
have to see him slowly slip from this life. But as I read of Keats’ final
months I was deeply impressed by the devotion of those who cared for him. He
was obviously a man who inspired great love and loyalty from those who came to
know him. Keats was, by most people’s standards, a very great poet and his work
stands as a great legacy of a man who died before the age of twenty-five. But
Keats was certainly no lonely, Byronic hero. He was a passionate, loving,
humorous man who inspired great respect and a tender sense of affection from
those who knew him.
