Keats Flashcards
1
Q
How did intellectuals perceive Keats?
A
- Outside his friend Leigh Hunt ‘s circle of liberal intellectuals, the conservative reviewers of the day attacked his work as mawkish and bad-mannered, as the work of an upstart “vulgar Cockney poetaster” and as consisting of “the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language”
2
Q
What was Keats’s education like?
A
- Although Keats had a liberal education in the boy’s academy at Enfield and trained at Guy’s Hospital to become a surgeon, he had no formal literary education
- If his brother remembered Keats’s emotional distress, Mathew, writing to Keats’s biographer Richard Monckton Milnes more than thirty years later, remembered that Keats “enjoyed good health—a fine flow of animal spirits—was fond of company—could amuse himself admirably with the frivolities of life—and had great confidence in himself.”
- Keats was heavily influenced by his love of Ancient Greece and Roman history and mythology, which began very early in his life - whilst not showing remarkable intellectual ability, teenage Keats constantly pored over classical dictionaries and read Greek mythology, at John Clarke’s school’s library. Keats was not a classic student, but he read historical treaties on ancient Greece and Rome and classic literature independently, thus cultivating this knowledge during his medical career
- His artist friend Benjamin Robert Haydon had taken him to see the marbles in March 1817 and Keats had responded with two sonnets published in the Annals in April 1818
3
Q
What was Keats’s childhood like?
A
- Thomas Keats managed the stable for his father-in-law and later owned it, providing the family an income comfortable enough for them to buy a home and send the older children, John and George (1797-1841), to the small village academy of Enfield, run by the liberal and gifted teacher John Clarke
4
Q
How did tragedy affect Keats?
A
- On the night of 15 April 1804, when Keats had been in school less than a year, an accident occurred that would be the first in a series of losses and dislocations that would pursue him throughout his brief life. His father was seriously injured when his horse stumbled as he rode home, and he died the next day.
- Within two months of her husband’s death, Frances Keats had moved the children to her mother’s home and remarried; but the marriage soon proved disastrous, and it appears that, after losing the stables and some of her inheritance to her estranged husband, William Rawlings, the poet’s mother left the family, perhaps to live with another man. She had returned by 1808, however, broken and ill; she died of tuberculosis (as had her brother just a few months before) in March 1809
- John became the oldest male in his family, and, to the end of his life, felt a fiercely protective loyalty to his brothers and sister, Fanny Keats. His most thoughtful and moving letters on poetry’s relation to individual experience, to human suffering and spiritual development, were written to his brothers
- After his brother Tom’s death Keats developed what he called a “horrid morbidity” in his temperament and passed through another period of the depression and restlessness that constantly plagued him
5
Q
What was the relationship with Shelly?
A
- It was perhaps good advice, but Keats never warmed to Shelley as Shelley did to him as when Harriet died, Shelly cautioned Keats to wait for publication until he had a more mature body of work from which to compile a volume
- In the years that followed it was common to believe that these attacks had shaken Keats’s resolve and broken his health: Shelley, for reasons of his own, exaggerated the effect of the conservative reviewers’ savagery (he himself wrote, but did not send, a balanced defence of Endymion, which he privately disliked, although he recognized Keats’s genius). Byron was at first scornful of Keats’s weakness, as Shelley portrayed it to him, but refused to criticize him publicly after his death. Charles Brown, too, spread abroad the notion that Keats had been dealt “his death-blow.”
6
Q
How did Keats perceive the poet?
A
- The struggle of the poet to create beauty had become itself paradigmatic of spiritual and imaginative quest to perceive the transcendent or the enduring in a world of suffering and death. For Keats, characteristically, this quest for a transcendent truth can be expressed (or even conceived of) only in the terms of an intense, imaginative engagement with sensuous beauty: “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.”
- Keats emphasizes that the artist remains aloof from single perspectives on life, because truly to paint life’s intensity is to reveal its fiercely dual nature and the precariousness of all attempts to fix or rationalize it: “it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”
7
Q
What is Keats’ concept of negative capability?
A
Keats’s best-known doctrine, Negative Capability, implies an engagement in the actual through imaginative identification that is simultaneously a kind of transcendence. The artist loses the Selfhood that demands a single perspective or “meaning,” identifies with the experience of his/her object, and lets that experience speak itself through him/her. Both the conscious soul and the world are transformed by a dynamic openness to each other. This transformation is art’s “truth,” its alliance with concrete human experience; its “beauty” is then its ability to abstract and universalize from that experience the enduring forms of the heart’s desires
8
Q
How did the Lake district inspire Keats?
A
The trip through the Lake country was invigorating; Keats and Brown energetically hiked in the mountains around Rydal and Ambleside. In the evenings Keats wrote long journal letters to Tom filled with natural detail and excited purpose: “I shall learn poetry here,” he wrote amid the rocks and waterfalls, “and shall henceforth write more than ever…”
9
Q
What was his relationship like with Fanny?
A
- Keats’s relationship to Fanny Brawne has tantalized generations of lovers of his poetry. On 25 December 1818 they declared their love; they were engaged (though without much public announcement) in October 1819. But Keats felt he could not marry until he had established himself as a poet—or proved to himself he could not. What Fanny felt is hard to know. Keats burned all but her last letters, which were buried with him. From Keats’s letters we get a picture of a lively, warm-hearted young woman, fashionable and social. She respected Keats’s vocation but did not pretend to be literary
- In the winter of 1819, he nearly decided to give up poetry and write for some London review. He was often confused and depressed, worried about money, often desperate with the pain of being unable to marry Fanny Brawne, to whom he became openly engaged about October. Dilke, Brown, and visitors to Wentworth Place became concerned for his health and his state of mind: “from this period,” wrote Dilke, “his weakness & his sufferings, mental & bodily, increased—his whole mind & heart were in a whirl of contending passions—he saw nothing calmly or dispassionately.” He even, on the verge of concluding publishing arrangements with Taylor in November
- It has often been pointed out that the thinking in Ode on Melancholy on the paradox of desire emerges as much from Keats’s experience as from abstract meditation. By May 1819 Keats’s relationship to Fanny Brawne was strained by her again moving next door, intensifying his frustration and anger at himself that he could not provide for her and marry her. He must have felt that he could never have a sexual relationship with her or a “normal” married life while his career, and soon his health, was so uncertain. Adding to this concern, in June, were severe financial pressures, including news that George’s wife was pregnant and the couple in dire need as they tried to establish themselves in America. Keats considered giving poetry a last try, but returned all the books he had borrowed and thought of becoming a surgeon, perhaps on a ship. Brown persuaded him to make one more attempt at publishing, and he wrote to Haydon, “My purpose now is to make one more attempt in the Press if that fail, `ye hear no more of me’ as Chaucer says…” In July he left for Shanklin, the Isle of Wight, where he would stay with his ailing friend, James Rice, to begin his last and most intense session of writing
10
Q
How does illusion link to his poetry?
A
- In Ode to a Nightingale, the poet attempts to flee the “weariness, the fever, and the fret,” of our tragic existence, “Where youth grows pale, and spectre—thin, and dies,” first through an ecstasy of intoxication and then “on the viewless wings of Poesy,” through imagination itself. In the crucial and difficult middle section of the poem, the mind attempting both to transcend life and remain aware of itself becomes lost in a dark wild, an “embalmed darkness” of fleeting sensations that suggests not escape but its very opposite, death. But the nightingale—or, rather, its song as the imagination elaborates upon it—is immortal, and in “ancient days” belonged to a world of enchantment. It is the same song, “that oft—times hath / Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.” With these beautiful words the poem turns about, the word forlorn shocking the poet into awareness. The beauty of an imagined “long ago” suggested by this word (forlorn = “long ago”) turns by a sad pun (forlorn = “sad”) into a remarkable moment of pained self-consciousness. The bird flies off, and “the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf. / … / Was it a vision or a waking dream? / Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?” The poem ends by dismantling its own illusion
- That illusion is that imagination, by creating permanence and beauty, may allow the individual himself a transcendence of the mind’s fleeting sensations, like the bird’s song. But imagination needs temporality to do its work. It then tantalizes us with a desire to experience the eternity of the beauty we create. But again, no real experience is possible to us—as the central stanzas suggest—apart from time and change. Imagination seems to falsify: the more the poet presses the bird to contain, the more questionable this imaginative projection becomes. For Keats, an impatience for truth only obscures it. If art redeems experience at all it is in the beauty of a more profound comprehension of ourselves (not of a transcendent realm), of the paradoxes of our nature. To expect art to provide a more certain closure is to invite only open questions or deeper enigmas. In Ode on a Grecian Urn this theme is explored from the perspective not of a natural and fleeting experience (the bird song) but of a work of pictorial art, a timeless rendering of a human pageant
- In the Ode on Melancholy the subject is not the ironies of our experience of art but of intense experience itself. Melancholy is not just a mood associated with sad objects; in this poem, it is the half-hidden cruel logic of human desire and fulfilment. In our temporal condition the most intense pleasure shades off into emptiness and the pain of loss, fulfilment even appearing more intense as it is more ephemeral. Keats’s thinking, then, had matured with remarkable speed from the poet of Endymion, for whom a poetry of intense sensation was itself a model of transcendence. His maturing irony had developed into a re-evaluation and meditative probing of his earlier concerns, the relation of art and the work of imagination to concrete experience. But the odes also show supreme formal mastery: from the play of rhyme (his ode stanza is a brilliantly compressed yet flexible development from sonnet forms), to resonance of puns and woven vowel sounds, the form itself embodies the logic of a dialogue among conflicting and counterbalancing thoughts and intuitions
- Keats was a known opium addict and had become aware of potions and their uses through his apothecary apprenticeship - he used these drugs to transcendence to a dream-like, temporary start of bliss, similar to that of which he could achieve through the imaginative writing process
11
Q
What were Keats’ experiences in Italy?
A
- Keats left for Rome in November 1820, accompanied by Joseph Severn, the devoted young painter who, alone in a strange country, nursed Keats and managed his affairs daily until his death. They took pleasant rooms on the Piazza di Spagna, and for a while Keats took walks and rode out on a small horse. He tried to keep his friend’s spirits up, and it is characteristic of the man that he was always concerned for poor Severn. In his last weeks he suffered terribly and hoped for the peace of death. He was in too much pain to look at letters, especially from Fanny Brawne, believing that frustrated love contributed to his ill health. He asked Severn to bury her letters with him (it is not clear he did). On the night of 23 February 1821, Keats died, peacefully, in Severn’s arms. His last words were to comfort Severn: “Severn—lift me up—I am dying—I shall die easy—don’t be frightened—be firm, and thank God it has come!”
- His writing displays Pre-Raphaelite conventions such as inspiration from visual art and literature, atmosphere and mood over narrative and art for art-sake
12
Q
How did Keats view religion?
A
Keats was not a Christian so could not look to Christian faith to explain human suffering and difficulty, instead he turned to the glories of Hellenism (classical Greek culture) with its mixture of nature and erotic love, from which he creates something beautiful and immortal, through the power of the human imagination
13
Q
What is written on his gravestone?
A
“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” is written on his gravestone and draws links to the sonnet on the sea
14
Q
What did Keats write about himself as a poet?
A
- Keats October 1818: “(I am) that sort distinguished from the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime, it (my poetry) has no self - it is everything and nothing” - Keats believed that to be a genuine poet you must make your work about the writing and skill, not about your own identity.
- Keats October 1818: “A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence
- Keats October 1818 - “I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest”
15
Q
How did Keats bring the natural sensory experience to his poetry?
A
- Keats’s love for nature is more simplistic, sensuous, aesthetical
- Keats believed that sensory experience was the vehicle through which one perceived truth and beauty, and he tried to recreate the world of sensation in his poetry through his rich use of imagery and his manipulation of sound patterns. He set out his aesthetic vision in a letter to John Taylor in 1818, telling him ‘I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity.’ Such ‘fine excess’ can be seen in the way Keats’s poems are densely packed with sensuous imagery
- Keats was influenced by Wordsworth, admiring the way, he incorporated the problems of the world into a transcendent vision but he imposed the vision of the egotistical sublime
- He attempts to recreate the world of sensation in his poetry
