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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Hyperion," John Keats crafts an epic poem that explores profound themes of suffering, beauty, and the struggle for immortality through the lens of Greek mythology. Written in a lofty, lyrical style, the poem unfolds the downfall of the Titan Hyperion, juxtaposing the magnificence of celestial beings with the inherent decay of the mortal world. With rich and evocative imagery, Keats invites readers to contemplate the nature of change and the artistic quest for transcendence amidst chaos, reflecting the Romantic era's emphasis on imagination and emotion. John Keats, one of the most celebrated figures of the Romantic movement, drew inspiration from his own experiences of love, loss, and the fleeting beauty of life. His personal struggles, including the early deaths of family members and his own health challenges, infused his work with a deep appreciation for the ephemeral nature of existence. These elements are palpably present in "Hyperion," as Keats grapples with his poetic ambitions and the daunting realization of human limitations. This unabridged edition of "Hyperion" is a must-read for scholars and enthusiasts alike, offering a profound meditation on artistry and existence. Keats' rich language and philosophical depth provide a rewarding experience, inviting readers to engage with timeless questions that resonate long after the final lines. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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John Keats: Hyperion (Unabridged)
Table of Contents
Introduction
At the trembling hour when an elder cosmos falters and a younger radiance gathers, Hyperion transforms upheaval into song. John Keats sets his gaze on the brink of a mythic succession to contemplate how worlds change and what is gained, or lost, when power passes to new hands. The poem holds its readers in a poised stillness, suspended between ruin and renewal, grandeur and grief. Even as it remains famously unfinished, Hyperion carries the implacable momentum of an epic vision, inviting us to listen to the deep music of change and to feel its human weight beneath divine names.
Hyperion endures as a classic because it unites monumental ambition with a piercing intimacy of feeling. Keats turns inherited myth into a living instrument, capable of sounding the anxieties of modernity: the fear of obsolescence, the ache of beauty endangered, the cost of progress measured in suffering. Its fragmentary state has not diminished its standing; rather, it magnifies the aura of potential, the sense of a masterpiece caught in mid-flight. Critics, poets, and readers return to it for the chiselled purity of its language and the way it renews epic grandeur without sacrificing the tender knowledge of mortal pain.
In literary history, Hyperion marks a decisive moment in Romantic self-definition. Keats measures himself against the English epic tradition, particularly the resonant blank verse associated with Milton, and in doing so remakes that heritage for his own age. The poem’s statuesque surfaces and sculptural imagery reflect a young poet stretching toward the severe beauty of the classical, while its tremors of doubt and pity register the Romantic conscience. As a fragment, it also foreshadows later artistic modernity, where the incomplete piece can stand as a finished emblem of inquiry. Its authority comes as much from restraint as from splendour.
Subsequent poets have drawn from Hyperion’s powerful alloy of mythic scale and human poignancy. Its cadenced blank verse and intense visual textures helped open a path for Victorian and later writers to reimagine ancient stories as mirrors of contemporary feeling. The poem’s fascination with transition—how one order yields to another—echoes in countless treatments of historical change, artistic succession, and personal metamorphosis. Even beyond poetry, its example has encouraged artists to trust the expressive force of fragment and threshold. That influence rests not on explicit imitation but on a widely felt permission to seek grandeur without abandoning vulnerability.
Composed in 1818–1819, Hyperion is an unfinished epic by John Keats, one of the central figures of English Romanticism. A version of the poem appeared in his 1820 volume, the last published in his lifetime, where it stood as a fragment of remarkable austerity and power. During 1819, Keats began reworking the material as The Fall of Hyperion, a distinct, also unfinished poem that approaches the same concerns through a different frame. The present unabridged text preserves Hyperion in its original, severe epic manner. Keats’s aim was not antiquarian display, but a probing meditation on change, suffering, and visionary responsibility.
Formally, Hyperion is written in blank verse—unrhymed pentameter—whose weight and cadence evoke an elevated, sculptural poise. Keats harnesses that sonorous measure to a sensuous, precise imagery, so that marble stillness and living breath seem to coexist in the same line. The poem’s atmosphere is at once solar and sepulchral: light dazzles on ruined grandeur; silence is pressed into speech. Without ornate digression, the language achieves a ceremonial gravity, yet it remains tactile and immediate, filled with textures of stone, cloud, flame, and leaf. The result is an architecture of feeling, where every phrase seems hewn to bear vast pressure.
Thematically, Hyperion explores the ethics of power and the dignity of loss. It asks what authority can mean when strength alone no longer persuades, and how wisdom might arise from defeat. Keats’s imagination moves toward a form of renewal that does not erase sorrow, but rather absorbs it into a broader understanding of beauty and truthfulness. The poem is also a study of voice and silence—who speaks, who cannot, and what it costs to articulate pain. Taken together, these inquiries amount to a meditation on growth: how beings, and by extension cultures, learn to endure change without hardening into pride or despair.
Keats stages his meditation within Greek myth, a theatre both distant and intimate. The Titans, embodiments of an older order, bear the gravitas of a monumental past; the emergent gods carry the untested brightness of a new dawn. By telling of a world in transition, the poem keeps our attention fixed on thresholds—doorways between ages, identities, artistic styles. Its mythic figures stand not as allegories flattened to single meanings, but as living presences whose griefs and hopes resonate with our own. Because the narrative remains open, the reader participates in the drama of becoming, where certainty is less honest than compassion.
The poem’s composition belongs to Keats’s extraordinary burst of creativity around 1818–1819, a period shadowed by personal loss and illuminated by artistic discovery. As a younger member of the Romantic generation, he wrote amid intense debates about tradition, innovation, and the role of the imagination. Hyperion absorbs these currents without polemic, translating them into an elemental scene of succession. The pressure of history is there—the sense that an age is ending—yet Keats’s focus is inward as well as cosmic. He binds public transition to private feeling, allowing the experience of grief and endurance to inform the contemplation of change.
Keats’s later attempt to recast the material as The Fall of Hyperion suggests how deeply he felt the ethical and visionary questions raised here. The second project, with its dream-vision frame, approaches the responsibilities of seeing and saying from another angle, but the original Hyperion, presented unabridged in this volume, retains a distinctive, austere clarity. Its concentration on the immediate aftermath of upheaval gives it a sculpted intensity: we attend to posture, breath, and the first stirrings of thought before any new order is fully named. In this restraint lies much of the poem’s majesty and enduring fascination.
To read Hyperion is to enter a slow, resonant space where the ear guides the eye. The blank verse invites a patient attention to cadence and pause, rewarding readers who let the lines breathe aloud. Keats’s images are tactile and architectural, inviting contemplation rather than haste: light falls, stone cools, a hush gathers. The poem’s incompletion becomes part of its experience, allowing us to dwell in the aftershock of change without the comforts of closure. Such dwelling is not barren; it is a schooling in perception, a way of feeling one’s way from awe, through pity, toward a tempered hope.
In sum, Hyperion offers a rare combination of grandeur, sympathy, and intellectual poise. Its principal concerns—succession, loss, renewal, and the testing of authority—remain intimately relevant in any era unsettled by rapid change. Readers today will find in its measured music a counterpoint to haste, and in its compassion a guide for thinking about what it means to inherit and to be surpassed. As an unfinished epic, it models the courage to pause where certainty fails, trusting that truth may emerge from patience and humility. That is why this work continues to move, challenge, and console across generations.
Synopsis (Selection)
Hyperion is John Keats’s unfinished epic in blank verse recounting the decline of the Titans and the emergence of a new celestial order. Unabridged editions commonly pair it with Keats’s later reimagining, The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, which revisits the material through a visionary frame. Together, they present a sequence of solemn tableaux rather than a completed story, emphasizing grief, counsel, prophecy, and transformation. The narrative follows the defeated elder gods as they confront change and the hint of a successor race, especially centered on Apollo. This synopsis outlines the major scenes and ideas in the order they appear across both fragments.
The poem opens in a deep, shaded valley where Saturn, once sovereign among the Titans, sits deposed and silent. Thea finds him and gives measured comfort, but cannot restore his lost dominion. The stillness around them underscores the scale of the upheaval: the old authority is broken, and the world feels altered. This quiet, sorrowful beginning establishes the poem’s mood and stakes. Thea urges movement, and Saturn rouses himself to seek his peers. The focus then widens beyond the vale, hinting that Hyperion alone retains his ancient strength, even as forebodings gather over his shining domain.
Attention turns to Hyperion’s radiant halls, where signs of disturbance shadow the ordered splendor. Attendants sense a change in their lord’s light, and a hush falls over the palace of the sun. Hyperion, troubled yet resolute, considers the source of the omen and prepares to act. He summons his coursers and departs, intent on confronting whatever threatens the balance. These scenes build tension and contrast his unfallen power with the widespread desolation among his kin. The movement outward from the still palace sets the stage for councils and revelations that will determine the fate of the elder gods.
The narrative shifts to a cavernous refuge where the Titans assemble. Saturn arrives to a chorus of lament and debate. Some, like Enceladus, call for swift retaliation, urging strength and thunder. Others counsel patience and thought. Oceanus speaks with calm authority, proposing that the change overtaking them follows a larger law and cannot be reversed by force. He suggests that a new order may surpass the old in grace. This measured perspective does not end the quarrel, but reframes it. The gathering becomes a searching inquiry into power, legitimacy, and what qualifies a being to rule the heavens.
Clymene adds a pivotal testimony, recounting an encounter with a youth whose song outshone the Titans’ might. The description points toward qualities associated with Apollo—music, clarity, and a serene strength. Her report deepens the assembly’s unease, tilting the debate from retaliation toward recognition of inevitable succession. Yet no consensus emerges. The elder gods remain divided between defiance and acceptance, while Hyperion’s path stays distinct from their deliberations. The scene closes with uncertainty preserved: the Titans’ council has identified the pressure of a new presence, but they have neither chosen nor achieved a definitive course.
Book III introduces Apollo in conversation with Mnemosyne, the personification of Memory. He seeks understanding of his calling, sensing both promise and burden. In a concentrated sequence, awareness floods him with overwhelming intensity, and his identity clarifies through pain and insight. The passage implies a transformation that aligns him with a solar destiny, suggesting the replacement of the old dispensation by a new one grounded in heightened knowledge and ordered beauty. The narrative breaks here, leaving the implied transition incomplete and the fate of Hyperion and the Titans unstated, while firmly establishing the direction of change.
The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream revisits the material through a first-person vision. A narrator approaches a sacred precinct, passes through trials of hunger and endurance, and meets Moneta, a severe guardian of truth and memory. She challenges him to distinguish genuine vision from idle dreaming and tests whether he can bear the weight of reality. Only after proving fortitude does he gain access to the scenes of the Titans. This frame relocates the mythic struggle within a temple of perception, linking the fate of gods to the qualifications required to witness and convey profound, often painful, knowledge.
Guided by Moneta, the narrator beholds Saturn’s ruin, hears the counsel that once circled him, and sees Hyperion struggle to hold his realm amid encroaching change. Hints of Apollo’s ascent recur, echoing the earlier fragment’s trajectory. The emphasis falls on necessity and transition: what declines yields space to what answers a higher order of harmony. At the same time, the vision underscores the cost of such shifts and the demand they make on any beholder. The sequence approaches a point of crisis but remains open, maintaining focus on the process of recognition rather than on a concluded outcome.
Taken together, the fragments trace a passage from loss to emergent form, aligning cosmic succession with the discovery of a new standard for rule grounded in beauty, clarity, and understanding. The work presents change as inexorable yet intelligible, revealed through councils, testimonies, and transformations. Its paired modes—a panoramic myth and a dream-vision of witness and endurance—converge on the idea that true seeing requires sympathy and strength. Because the poems are unfinished, they leave the final disposition unstated, but the central movement is clear: an old order yields, and a new light rises according to a deeper law.
Historical Context
John Keats sets Hyperion in a mythic, pre-Olympian cosmos modeled on ancient Greece, where the Titans—Saturn (Cronus), Hyperion, Thea, Oceanus—face displacement by the younger Olympians. The geography is both terrestrial and celestial: marble plains, chill valleys, and star-filled immensities that evoke a sculptural, Hellenic landscape before human history. Time is cyclical and monumental rather than chronological, suggesting an era before recorded politics, when cosmic rule and divine succession determine order. The poem’s solemn councils, laments, and visionary vistas, though beyond mortal states, systematically mirror crises of sovereignty, legitimacy, and historical transition recognizable to readers in early nineteenth-century Britain.
Keats composed Hyperion in late 1818 and early 1819, drafting largely at Wentworth Place, Hampstead, after a grueling northern walking tour (June–August 1818) and amid his brother Tom Keats’s decline and death on 1 December 1818. The poet wrote under the shadow of postwar austerity and intensifying political repression during the British Regency (George, Prince Regent; Lord Liverpool as prime minister, 1812–1827). He abandoned the first version by spring 1819, then recast it as The Fall of Hyperion (summer–autumn 1819). Thus a poem set in a remote mythic Greece is inseparable from the London of magistrates, newspapers, and legislation that contested reform after Waterloo.
The French Revolution (1789) detonated a European crisis of sovereignty: the fall of the Bastille (14 July 1789), abolition of feudal privileges (August 1789), the execution of Louis XVI (January 1793), and the Jacobin Terror (1793–1794). Britain entered war with revolutionary France in 1793, while domestic debate split Edmund Burke’s counterrevolutionary Reflections (1790) and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–1792). Pitt’s government responded to British radical societies with the Treason Trials (1794) and the Seditious Meetings and Treasonable Practices Acts (1795). Keats, born 1795, matured within the Revolution’s long aftershock. Hyperion’s conflict—old rulers supplanted by a new, vital order—transposes late eighteenth-century convulsions into mythic register.
The Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815) reshaped Britain’s economy, politics, and consciousness. Naval supremacy was secured at Trafalgar (21 October 1805) under Horatio Nelson; land victories culminated at Waterloo (18 June 1815) with Wellington defeating Napoleon. The Continental System (from 1806) and blockade warfare warped trade, spiking prices and straining labor. War finance swelled Britain’s national debt and tethered provincial livelihoods to global conflict. After 1815, demobilization and debt haunted the nation. Hyperion’s monumental grief and exhausted grandeur echo a culture emerging from two decades of mobilization, casualties, and propaganda, and wondering whether the new “Jupiterian” order will redeem or merely replace the old regime’s burdens.
The Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) restored monarchies and crafted a balance-of-power system under Klemens von Metternich, while Britain, represented by Lord Castlereagh, endorsed continental stability. The Holy Alliance (1815) signaled a conservative consensus to contain revolution. At home, Lord Liverpool’s cabinet favored order and gradualism, often policing dissent. The language of restoration, legitimacy, and providential equilibrium pervaded elite discourse. In Hyperion, the Titan Oceanus articulates a historicist justification for Jupiter’s ascendancy: the new embodies a higher “degree” of beauty and power. That argument resembles contemporary claims that post-Napoleonic settlement promised a more rational, pacific Europe—however contested by those suffering repression and scarcity.
The Corn Laws (1815), enacted as 55 Geo III c.26, barred imported grain when domestic prices fell below 80 shillings per quarter, protecting landowners but inflating bread prices for workers. In 1816–1818, prices gyrated while wages lagged, stoking riots from East Anglia to the Midlands. The legislation became a symbol of aristocratic self-interest. Keats moved in circles (Leigh Hunt’s Examiner) that criticized such protectionism as unjust to the poor. Hyperion’s sympathetic portraits of dethroned Titans, mourning a world’s suffering and loss, resonate with public resentment at policies privileging landholding elites even as urban and rural laborers endured dear food and chronic insecurity.
Postwar depression and climate shocks deepened distress. The 1816 “Year Without a Summer,” caused by the April 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, produced failed harvests, cold, and famine across Europe. Britain’s demobilized soldiers and sailors flooded labor markets, while parish relief ballooned under the Speenhamland-type allowances. Bread and wage riots erupted in 1816–1817; bankruptcies multiplied. Such environmental and economic adversity colored the 1818–1819 atmosphere in which Keats drafted Hyperion. The poem’s imagery—frosty stillness, heavy skies, and a numb grandeur shorn of warmth—captures collective exhaustion after catastrophe, as if a Titan world had been starved by forces beyond its control and now faced inevitable replacement.
The Peterloo Massacre (16 August 1819) in St Peter’s Field, Manchester, saw approximately 60,000 peaceful reformers gathered to hear Henry Hunt demand parliamentary representation. Local magistrates ordered the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry, and then the 15th Hussars, to disperse the crowd; at least 15 were killed and more than 600 injured. Eyewitness reports by journalist John Tyas and editor James Wroe galvanized outrage nationwide. Keats, revising his epic project in 1819, lived through the shock and punitive aftermath. The Fall of Hyperion intensifies the ethical test of the visionary poet, suggesting that to witness suffering truthfully after Peterloo required passing from mere dreaming into responsible, historical seeing.
In December 1819, Parliament passed the Six Acts to suppress dissent: the Seditious Meetings Prevention Act; the Blasphemous and Seditious Libels Act (raising penalties); the Newspaper and Stamp Duties Act (extending stamp taxes); the Misdemeanours Act (expediting trials); the Seizure of Arms Act; and the Training Prevention Act. Royal assent arrived 18–24 December. These measures handicapped public assembly, cheap print, and paramilitary drilling. For Keats’s metropolitan milieu, the Acts chilled debate and emboldened informers. Hyperion’s fallen deities, silenced and scattered by an ascendant power, mirror a political culture where old voices were driven inward, compelled to reconceive authority under the pressure of coercive law.
The radical press and its persecution shaped Keats’s immediate world. Leigh Hunt, editor of the Examiner, was imprisoned (1813–1815) for libeling the Prince Regent. Government prosecutions, stamp duties, and loyalist periodicals sought to discipline opinion. In 1818, Blackwood’s Magazine attacked the so-called “Cockney School,” targeting Keats by name, while the Quarterly Review (John Wilson Croker) derided Endymion later that year. Such campaigns exemplified a political-literary struggle over taste, class, and power. Hyperion’s austere, marble diction and tragic self-scrutiny can be read as Keats’s counter to caricatures of frivolity: an epic of sovereignty framed under the heaviest public pressure a young poet could feel.
Popular unrest and state surveillance punctuated 1816–1820. The Spa Fields meetings (November–December 1816) in London culminated in a march and sporadic violence; the 1817 suspension of Habeas Corpus and the Treason and Seditious Meetings Acts followed. The Pentrich Rising (June 1817) in Derbyshire, abetted by the agent provocateur “Oliver,” ended with trials, executions, and transportation. The Cato Street Conspiracy (February 1820) to assassinate ministers was foiled; five conspirators were executed. This climate taught both radicals and reformers the costs of open agitation. Hyperion’s clandestine councils and apprehensive oratory capture the psychology of opposition under watch, where misstep could invite annihilation.
The arrival of the Parthenon sculptures (the Elgin Marbles), removed between 1801 and 1812 and purchased by the British Museum in 1816 after a parliamentary Select Committee, transformed British engagement with Greek antiquity. Keats visited the marbles in March 1817, writing “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” and valorized Chapman’s Homer (1816) as a portal to epic Greece. Hyperion’s Titans resemble weathered statues—immense, cold, broken—while the Olympians bear an ideal luminosity. This sculptural idiom is inseparable from the museum’s debated imperial acquisition, where Britain’s empire staged itself as guardian of Hellenic legacy. The poem’s Greek stage thus intersects with imperial collecting and national self-fashioning.
Greece’s political plight under Ottoman rule and mounting European Philhellenism formed a live backdrop. Though the Greek War of Independence erupted in 1821, after Keats’s drafts, philhellenic committees and debates about Greek liberty were already current in the 1810s. Lord Byron’s travels (1809–1811) and later death at Missolonghi (1824) symbolized the movement. For British readers, Greek antiquity was not only aesthetic but political: a template for republican virtue and national rebirth. Hyperion’s mythic Titanomachy—tyranny supplanted by a new order grounded in beauty and intelligence—spoke to hopes that Greece, and by analogy Britain, might renew political life without bloodlust.
Scientific and medical modernity reframed knowledge and authority. Keats apprenticed to surgeon Thomas Hammond (1811) and trained at Guy’s Hospital (1815–1816), passing the Society of Apothecaries examination (1816). London’s Royal Institution popularized chemistry under Humphry Davy, while astronomer William Herschel’s discoveries (Uranus, 1781; nebulae) expanded cosmic imagination. The period’s analytical temper, anatomical precision, and awe before new heavens permeate Hyperion’s sensory exactness and astronomical metaphors. The epic’s tension between intuitive grandeur (Titan feeling) and sharpened, enlightened order (Olympian clarity) mirrors a society negotiating the claims of empirical science against inherited authorities and intuitions—another axis of historical modernization.
Debates over poverty policy intensified in the 1810s. The Speenhamland system (from 1795) linked parish relief to bread prices, expanding allowances as grain costs rose. Poor rates climbed steeply after war, straining parish finances; a 1817 parliamentary committee weighed reform amid rising vagrancy and rural unrest. While the 1834 New Poor Law lay ahead, the earlier crisis exposed the limits of paternalist relief. Hyperion’s meditation on exhausted sovereignty—Saturn’s melancholy, Oceanus’s acceptance of lawful succession—can be read as an allegory for structures that, however well intentioned, no longer answered social suffering. The poem figures transition as a moral necessity rather than a mere seizure.
As political allegory, Hyperion critiques the brittle legitimism of its age by demanding that rule justify itself through a higher standard of vitality and beauty. The poem’s sympathy toward the defeated insists on historical responsibility: even rightful succession entails pain, and victors must answer for that cost. In 1819, after Peterloo and under the Six Acts, to imagine a transfer of power as lawful progress, rather than mere force, challenged a culture that equated stability with repression. Oceanus’s argument—succession by a law of growth—presses readers to measure institutions by their capacity to enlarge human feeling rather than merely preserve privilege.
The poem also exposes class divides and the violence underwriting “order.” The Titans’ grandeur masks their failures; the Olympians’ ascendancy is not innocent. Keats’s recasting in The Fall of Hyperion, where a visionary is tested as “man” not “dreamer,” underscores the ethical duty to witness suffering honestly—an implicit rebuke to a censored press and compliant courts. By staging sovereignty as a public, scrutinized drama, the work queries aristocratic insulation (Corn Laws, closed boroughs) and celebrates a merit of form and insight over birth. In Regency Britain, that amounted to a quiet radicalism: beauty and justice, not lineage, ground the right to govern.
Author Biography
John Keats (1795–1821) was a major poet of the English Romantic movement whose brief life produced a body of lyric and narrative verse of striking intensity, sensuousness, and philosophical poise. Though he published for only a few years, his odes and letters shaped later ideas of poetic imagination, beauty, and the relationship between art and mortality. Initially dismissed by some periodical critics, he is now regarded as one of the central figures of Romanticism. His poems balance classical myth and modern feeling, and his reflections on creative uncertainty—what he called “negative capability”—have resonated beyond literature, influencing criticism, aesthetics, and the broader understanding of artistic process.
Keats was educated at a progressive school in Enfield, where sustained reading and encouragement fostered his early literary interests. He gravitated to Edmund Spenser’s luxuriant style and to classical antiquity mediated through translations, notably Chapman’s Homer. Trained for a medical career, he was apprenticed to a surgeon-apothecary and later studied at Guy’s Hospital in London, passing the apothecaries’ examination in 1816. Around this time he entered a lively circle of writers and artists and received practical support and critical attention that helped redirect his ambitions decisively toward poetry. The combined pressures of medical training and imaginative aspiration sharpened his sense of vocation and the discipline required to pursue it.
Keats’s first book, Poems (1817), announced his voice in lyrics and sonnets, including the much-admired “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” He followed with Endymion (1818), an ambitious romance in heroic couplets exploring ideal beauty, famed for its opening line, “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.” The poem’s expansiveness and youthful manner drew harsh notices from influential journals, which grouped him with the so-called “Cockney School.” While the attacks stung, they did not derail his progress. Keats continued to read widely, refine his craft, and experiment with forms, moving toward a more concentrated style that would define his best work.
The creative outpouring of 1819 proved decisive. In a few months Keats composed a sequence of odes—among them “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “To Autumn,” “Ode on Melancholy,” “Ode on Indolence,” and “Ode to Psyche”—as well as “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” He also worked on the blank-verse epic Hyperion and its reimagining, The Fall of Hyperion, while producing richly narrative and descriptive poems such as The Eve of St. Agnes. Many of these pieces appeared in Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820), a collection greeted more warmly by discerning readers and later recognized as one of the signal books of English lyric poetry.
Keats’s letters are integral to his achievement. In them he formulated ideas about poetic identity and knowledge, coining “negative capability” to describe the capacity to dwell in uncertainties without grasping after fixed conclusions. He explored the “chameleon poet,” the shaping power of the imagination, and the notion of a world as a “vale of soul-making.” His reading was deep and eclectic, embracing Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser, classical art and myth, and contemporary writing. These influences, filtered through a sensibility alert to sound, image, and cadence, produced verse notable for tactile richness, syntactic poise, and a disciplined musicality that supports rather than obscures thought.
Keats’s later years were marked by strain and illness. He bore heavy responsibilities, including caring for an ailing brother, and formed a close romantic attachment that is preserved in notable correspondence. Symptoms of tuberculosis emerged in 1820, and on medical advice he sought a warmer climate. He traveled to Italy with the painter Joseph Severn, whose companionship and later recollections have shaped the record of Keats’s final months. Keats died in Rome in 1821 and was buried in the city’s Protestant Cemetery, where his gravestone—requested to bear no name—famously reads, “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water,” a phrase that has invited enduring reflection.
Keats’s posthumous reputation grew steadily through the nineteenth century, influencing poets such as Tennyson and shaping Victorian conceptions of lyric beauty. Twentieth-century critics examined his craft with new rigor, and the odes became touchstones for discussions of voice, irony, and form. Today his work remains widely taught and anthologized, valued for its sensuous detail, philosophical reach, and technical assurance. “To Autumn,” in particular, draws ecocritical and historical readings, while the letters continue to inform debates about creativity and knowledge. Keats stands as a central Romantic poet whose intense, compressed career yielded a lasting meditation on art, transience, and the capacities of language.
John Keats: Hyperion (Unabridged)
Life of John Keats by Sidney Colvin
Preface
To the name and work of Keats our best critics and scholars have in recent years paid ever closer attention and warmer homage. But their studies have for the most part been specialized and scattered, and there does not yet exist any one book giving a full and connected account of his life and poetry together in the light of our present knowledge and with help of all the available material. Ever since it was my part, some thirty years ago, to contribute the volume on Keats to the series of short studies edited by Lord Morley, (the English Men of Letters series), I have hoped one day to return to the subject and do my best to supply this want. Once released from official duties, I began to prepare for the task, and through the last soul-shaking years, being over age for any effectual war-service, have found solace and occupation in carrying it through.
The following pages, timed to appear in the hundredth year after the publication of Keats’ first volume, are the result. I have sought in them to combine two aims not always easy to be reconciled, those of holding the interest of the general reader and at the same time of satisfying, and perhaps on some points even informing, the special student. I have tried to set forth consecutively and fully the history of a life outwardly remarkable for nothing but its tragic brevity, but inwardly as crowded with imaginative and emotional experience as any on record, and moreover, owing to the openheartedness of the man and to the preservation and unreserved publication of his letters, lying bare almost more than any other to our knowledge. Further, considering for how much friendship counted in Keats’ life, I have tried to call up the group of his friends about him in their human lineaments and relations, so far as these can be recovered, more fully than has been attempted before. I believe also that I have been able to trace more closely than has yet been done some of the chief sources, both in literature and in works of art, of his inspiration. I have endeavoured at the same time to make felt the critical and poetical atmosphere, with its various and strongly conflicting currents, amid which he lived, and to show how his genius, almost ignored in its own day beyond the circle of his private friends, was a focus in which many vital streams of poetic tendency from the past centred and from which many radiated into the future. To illustrate this last point it has been necessary, by way of epilogue, to sketch, however briefly, the story of his posthumous fame, his after life in the minds and hearts of English writers and readers until to-day. By English I mean all those whose mother language is English. To follow the extension of Keats’ fame to the Continent is outside my aim. He has not yet, by means of translation and comment in foreign languages, become in any full sense a world-poet. But during the last thirty years the process has begun, and there would be a good deal to say, did my scheme admit it, of work upon Keats done abroad, especially in France, where our literature has during the last generation been studied with such admirable intelligence and care.
In an attempt of this scope, I have necessarily had to repeat matters of common knowledge and to say again things that others have said well and sufficiently already. But working from materials hitherto in part untouched, and taking notice of such new lights as have appeared while my task was in progress, I have drawn from them some conclusions, both biographical and critical, which I believe to be my own and which I hope may stand. I have not shrunk from quoting in full poems and portions of poems which everybody knows, in cases where I wanted the reader to have their text not merely in memory but actually before him, for re-studying with a fresh comment or in some new connexion. I have also quoted very largely from the poet’s letters, even now not nearly as much read as things so full of genius should be, both in order that some of his story may be told in his own words and for the sake of that part of his mind — a great and most interesting part — which is expressed in them but has not found its way into his poems. It must be added that when I found things in my former small book which I did not see my way to better and which seemed to fit into the expanded scale of this one, I have not hesitated sometimes to incorporate them — to the amount perhaps of forty or fifty pages in all.
I wish I could hope that my work will be found such as to justify the amount and variety of friendly help I have had in its preparation. Thanks for such help are due in more quarters than I can well call to mind. First and foremost, to Lord Crewe for letting me have free and constant access to his unrivalled collection of original documents connected with the subject, both those inherited from his father (referred to in the notes as ‘Houghton MSS.’) and those acquired in recent years by himself (referred to as ‘Crewe MSS.’). Speaking generally, it may be assumed that new matter for which no authority is quoted is taken from these sources. To Miss Henrietta Woodhouse of Weston Lea, Albury, I am indebted for valuable documentary and other information concerning her uncle Richard Woodhouse. Next in importance among collections of Keats documents to that of Lord Crewe is that of Mr J. P. Morgan in New York, the chief contents of which have by his leave been transcribed for me with the kindliest diligence by his librarian Miss Greene. For other illustrative documents existing in America, I believe of value, I should like to be able to thank their owners, Mr Day and Mr Louis Holman of Boston: but these gentlemen made a condition of their help the issue of a limited edition de luxe of the book specially illustrated from their material, a condition the publishers judged it impossible to carry out, at any rate in war-time.
Foremost among my scholarly helpers at home has been my friend Professor W. P. Ker. For information and suggestions in answer to enquiries of one kind or another I am indebted to Professor Israel Gollancz and Mr Henry Bradley; to Professor Ernest Weekley, the best living authority on surnames; to Mr A. H. Bullen; to Mr Falconer Madan and Mr J. W. Mackail; to Mr Thomas J. Wise; to Mr H. C. Shelley; to Mr J. D. Milner, Director of the National Portrait Gallery; and to my former colleague Mr A. H. Smith, Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum. Mr George Whale supplied me with full copies of and comments on the entries concerning Keats in the books of Guy’s Hospital. Dr Hambley Rowe of Bradford put at my disposal the results, unfortunately not yet conclusive, of the researches made by him as a zealous Cornishman on Keats’ possible Cornish descent. I must not omit thanks to Mr Emery Walker for his skill and pains in preparing the illustrations for my book. With reference to these, I may note that the head from the portrait painted by Severn in 1859 and now in Lord Crewe’s possession was chosen for colour reproduction as frontispiece because it is the fullest in colouring and, though done from memory so long after the poet’s death, to my mind the most satisfying and convincing in general air of any of the extant portraits. Of the miniature done by Severn from life in 1818, copied and recopied by himself, Charles Brown and others, and made familiar by numberless reproductions in black and white, the original, now deposited by the Dilke Trustees in the National Portrait Gallery, has the character of a monochrome touched with sharp notes or suggestions of colour in the hair, lips, hands, book, etc. I have preferred not to repeat either this or the equally well known — nay, hackneyed — and very distressing deathbed drawing made by Severn at Rome. The profile from Haydon’s life-mask of the poet is taken, not, like most versions of the same mask, from the plaster, but from an electrotype made many years ago when the cast was fresh and showing the structure and modellings of the head more subtly, in my judgment, than the original cast itself in its present state. Both cast and electrotype are in the National Portrait Gallery. So is the oil-painting of Keats seated reading, begun by Severn soon after the poet’s death and finished apparently two years later, which I have reproduced, well known though it is, partly for its appositeness to a phrase in one of his letters to his sister. Besides the portraits of Keats, I have added from characteristic sources those of the two men who most influenced him at the outset of his career, Leigh Hunt and Haydon. A new feature in my book is provided by the reproductions of certain works of art, both pictures and antiques, which can be proved or surmised to have struck and stimulated his imagination. The reproductions of autographs, one of his own and one of Haydon’s, speak for themselves.
Chapter I
1795-1815: BIRTH AND PARENTAGE: SCHOOLDAYS AND APPRENTICESHIP
For all the study and research, that have lately been spent on the life and work of Keats, there is one point as to which we remain as much in the dark as ever, and that is his family history. He was born at an hour when the gradually re-awakened genius of poetry in our race, I mean of impassioned and imaginative poetry, was ready to offer new forms of spiritual sustenance, and a range of emotions both widened and deepened, to a generation as yet only half prepared to receive them. If we consider the other chief poets who bore their part in that great revival[1q], we can commonly recognize either some strain of power in their blood or some strong inspiring quality in the scenery and traditions of their home, or both together. Granting that the scenic and legendary romance of the Scottish border wilds were to be made live anew for the delight of the latter-day world, we seem to see in Walter Scott a man predestined for the task alike by origin, association, and opportunity. Had the indwelling spirit of the Cumbrian lakes and mountains, and their power upon the souls and lives of those living among them, to be newly revealed and interpreted to the general mind of man, where should we look for its spokesman but in one of Wordsworth’s birth and training? What, then, it may be asked, of Byron and Shelley, the two great contrasted poets of revolution, or rather of revolt against the counter-revolution, in the younger generation, — the one worldly, mocking, half theatrically rebellious and Satanic, the other unworldly even to unearthliness, a loving alien among men, more than half truly angelic? These we are perhaps rightly used to count as offspring of their age, with its forces and ferments, its violent actions and reactions, rather than of their ancestry or upbringing. And yet, if we will, we may fancy Byron inspired in literature by demons of the same froward brood that had urged others of his lineage on lives of adventure or of crime, and may conceive that Shelley drew some of his instincts for headlong, peremptory self-guidance, though in directions most opposite to the traditional, from the stubborn and wayward stock of colonial and county aristocracy whence he sprang.
Keats, more purely and exclusively a poet than any of these, and responding more intuitively than any to the spell alike of ancient Greece, of mediæval romance, and of the English woods and fields, was born in a dull and middling walk of London city life, and ‘if by traduction came his mind’, — to quote Dryden with a difference, — it was through channels hidden from our search. From his case less even than from Shakespeare’s can we draw any argument as to the influence of heredity or environment on the birth and growth of genius. His origin, in spite of much diligent inquiry, has not been traced beyond one generation on the father’s side and two on the mother’s. His father, Thomas Keats, was a west-country lad who came young to London, and while still under twenty held the place of head ostler in a livery-stable kept by a Mr John Jennings in Finsbury. Seven or eight years later, about the beginning of 1795, he married his employer’s daughter, Frances Jennings, then in her twentieth year. Mr Jennings, who had carried on a large business in north-eastern London and the neighbouring suburbs, and was a man of substance, retired about the same time to live in the country, at Ponder’s End near Edmonton, leaving the management of the business in the hands of his son-in-law. At first the young couple lived at the stable, at the sign of the Swan and Hoop, Finsbury Pavement, facing the then open space of Lower Moorfields. Here their eldest child, the poet John Keats, was born prematurely on either the 29th or 31st of October, 1795. A second son, named George, followed on February 28, 1797; a third, Tom, on November 18, 1799; a fourth, Edward, who died in infancy, on April 28, 1801; and on the 3rd of June, 1803, a daughter, Frances Mary. In the meantime the family had moved from the stable to a house in Craven Street, City Road, half a mile farther north.
The Keats brothers as they grew up were remarked for their intense fraternal feeling and strong vein of family pride. But it was a pride that looked forward and not back: they were bent on raising the family name and credit, but seem to have taken no interest at all in its history, and have left no record or tradition concerning their forbears. Some of their friends believed their father to have been a Devonshire man: their sister, who long survived them, said she remembered hearing as a child that he came from Cornwall, near the Land’s End.
There is no positive evidence enabling us to decide the question. The derivation of English surnames is apt to be complicated and obscure, and ‘Keats’ is no exception to the rule. It is a name widely distributed in various counties of England, though not very frequent in any. It may in some cases be a possessive form derived from the female Christian name Kate, on the analogy of Jeans from Jane, or Maggs from Margaret: but the source accepted as generally probable for it and its several variants is the Middle-English adjective ‘kete’, a word of Scandinavian origin meaning bold, gallant. In the form ‘Keyte’ the name prevails principally in Warwickshire: in the variants Keat (or Keate) and Keats (or Keates) it occurs in many of the midland, home, and southern, especially the south-western, counties.
Mr Thomas Hardy tells me of a Keats family sprung from a horsedealer of Broadmayne, Dorsetshire, members of which lived within his own memory as farmers and publicans in and near Dorchester, one or two of them bearing, as he thought, a striking likeness to the portrait of the poet. One Keats family of good standing was established by the mid-eighteenth century in Devon, in the person of a well-known headmaster of Blundell’s school, Tiverton, afterwards rector of Bideford. His son was one of Nelson’s bravest and most famous captains, Sir Richard Godwin Keats of the ‘Superb’, and from the same stock sprang in our own day the lady whose tales of tragic and comic west-country life, published under the pseudonym ‘Zack’, gave promise of a literary career which has been unhappily cut short. But with this Bideford stock the Keats brothers can have claimed no connexion, or as schoolboys they would assuredly have made the prowess of their namesake of the ‘Superb’ their pride and boast, whereas in fact their ideal naval hero was a much less famous person, their mother’s brother Midgley John Jennings, a tall lieutenant of marines who served with some credit on Duncan’s flagship at Camperdown and by reason of his stature was said to have been a special mark for the enemy’s musketry. In the form Keat or Keate the name is common enough both in Devon, particularly near Tiverton, and in Cornwall, especially in the parishes of St Teath and Lanteglos, — that is round about Camelford, — and also as far eastward as Callington and westward as St Columb Major: the last named parish having been the seat of a family of the name entitled to bear arms and said to have come originally from Berkshire.
But neither the records of the Dorsetshire family, nor search in the parish registers of Devon and Cornwall, have as yet yielded the name of any Thomas Keat or Keats as born in 1768, the birth-year of our poet’s father according to our information. A ‘Thomas Keast’, however, is registered as having been born in that year in the parish of St Agnes, between New Quay and Redruth. Now Keast is a purely Cornish name, limited to those parts, and it is quite possible that, borne by a Cornishman coming to London, it would get changed into the far commoner Keats (a somewhat similar phonetic change is that of Crisp into Cripps). So the identification of this Thomas Keast of St Agnes as the father of our Keats is not to be excluded. The Jennings connexion is of itself a circumstance which may be held to add to the likelihood of a Cornish origin for the poet, Jennings being a name frequent in the Falmouth district and occurring as far westward as Lelant. Children are registered as born in and after 1770 of the marriage of a John Jennings to a Catherine Keate at Penryn; and it is a plausible conjecture (always remembering it to be a conjecture and no more) that the prosperous London stable-keeper Jonn Jennings was himself of Cornish origin, and that between him and the lad Thomas Keats, whom he took so young first as head stableman and then as son-in-law, there existed some previous family connexion or acquaintance. These, however, are matters purely conjectural, and all we really know about the poet’s parents are the dates above mentioned, and the fact that they were certainly people somewhat out of the ordinary. Thomas Keats was noticed in his lifetime as a man of sense, spirit, and conduct: ‘of so remarkably fine a commonsense and native respectability,’ writes Cowden Clarke, in whose father’s school the poet and his brother were brought up, ‘that I perfectly remember the warm terms in which his demeanour used to be canvassed by my parents after he had been to visit his boys.’ And again:— ‘I have a clear recollection of his lively and energetic countenance, particularly when seated on his gig and preparing to drive his wife home after visiting his sons at school. In feature, stature, and manner John resembled his father.’ Of Frances Keats, the poet’s mother, we learn more vaguely that she was ‘tall, of good figure, with large oval face, and sensible deportment’: and again that she was a lively, clever, impulsive woman, passionately fond of amusement, and supposed to have hastened the birth of her eldest child by some imprudence. Her second son, George, wrote in after life of her and of her family as follows:— ‘my grandfather Mr Jennings was very well off, as his will shows, and but that he was extremely generous and gullible would have been affluent. I have heard my grandmother speak with enthusiasm of his excellencies, and Mr Abbey used to say that he never saw a woman of the talents and sense of my grandmother, except my mother.’
As to the grandmother and her estimable qualities all accounts are agreed, but of the mother the witness quoted himself tells a very different tale. This Mr Richard Abbey was a wholesale tea-dealer in Saint Pancras Lane and a trusted friend of Mr and Mrs Jennings. In a memorandum written long after their death he declares that both as girl and woman their daughter, the poet’s mother, was a person of unbridled temperament, and that in her later years she fell into loose ways and was no credit to her family. Whatever truth there may be in these charges, it is certain that she lived to the end under her mother’s roof and was in no way cut off from her children. The eldest boy John in particular she is said to have held in passionate affection, by him passionately returned. Once as a young child, when she was ordered to be left quiet during an illness, he is said to have insisted on keeping watch at her door with an old sword, and allowing no one to go in. Haydon, an artist who loved to lay his colours thick, gives this anecdote of the sword a different turn:— ‘He was when an infant a most violent and ungovernable child. At five years of age or thereabouts, he once got hold of a naked sword and shutting the door swore nobody should go out. His mother wanted to do so, but he threatened her so furiously she began to cry, and was obliged to wait till somebody through the window saw her position and came to the rescue.’ Another trait of the poet’s childhood, mentioned also by Haydon, on the authority of a gammer who had known him from his birth, is that when he was first learning to speak, instead of answering sensibly, he had a trick of making a rime to the last word people said and then laughing.
The parents were ambitious for their boys, and would have liked to send them to Harrow, but thinking this beyond their means, chose the school kept by a Mr John Clarke at Enfield. The brothers of Mrs Keats, including the boys’ admired uncle, the lieutenant of marines, had been educated here, and the school was one of good repute, and of exceptionally pleasant aspect and surroundings. The schoolhouse had been originally built for a rich West India merchant, in the finest style of early Georgian classic architecture, and stood in a spacious garden at the lower end of the town. When years afterwards the site was used for a railway station, the old house was for some time allowed to stand: but later it was taken down, and the central part of the façade, with its fine proportions and rich ornaments in moulded brick, was transported to the South Kensington (now Victoria and Albert) Museum, and is still preserved there as a choice example of the style. It is evident that Mr Clarke was a kind and excellent schoolmaster, much above the standards of his time, and that lads with any bent for literature or scholarship had their full chance under him. Still more was this the case when his son Charles Cowden Clarke, a genial youth with an ardent and trained love of books and music, grew old enough to help him as usher in the school-work. The brothers John and George Keats were mere children when they were put under Mr Clarke’s care, John not much over and George a good deal under eight years old, both still dressed, we are told, in the childish frilled suits which give such a grace to groups of young boys in the drawings of Stothard and his contemporaries.
Not long after Keats had been put to school he lost his father, whose horse fell and threw him in the City Road as he rode home late one night after dining at Southgate, perhaps on his way home from the Enfield School. His skull was fractured: he was picked up unconscious about one o’clock and died at eight in the morning. This was on the 16th of April, 1804. Within twelve months his widow had taken a second husband — one William Rawlings, described as ‘of Moorgate in the city of London, stable-keeper,’ presumably therefore the successor of her first husband in the management of her father’s business. (It may be noted incidentally that Rawlings, like Jennings, is a name common in Cornwall, especially in and about the parish of Madron). This marriage must have turned out unhappily, for it was soon followed by a separation, under what circumstances or through whose fault we are not told. In the correspondence of the Keats brothers after they were grown up no mention is ever made of their stepfather, of whom the family seem soon to have lost all knowledge. Mrs Rawlings went with her children to live at Edmonton, in the house of her mother, Mrs Jennings, who was just about this time left a widow. The family was well enough provided for, Mr Jennings (who died March 8, 1805) having left a fortune of over £13,000, of which, in addition to other legacies, he bequeathed a capital yielding £200 a year to his widow absolutely; one yielding £50 a year to his daughter Frances Rawlings, with reversion to her Keats children after her death; and £1000 to be separately held in trust for the said children and divided among them on the coming of age of the youngest.
Between the home, then, in Church Street, Edmonton, and the neighbouring Enfield school, where the two elder brothers were in due time joined by the youngest, the next five years of Keats’ boyhood (1806-1811) were passed in sufficient comfort and pleasantness. He did not live to attain the years, or the success, of men who write their reminiscences; and almost the only recollections he has left of his own early days refer to holiday times in his grandmother’s house at Edmonton. They are conveyed in some rimes which he wrote years afterwards by way of foolishness to amuse his young sister, and testify to a partiality, common also to little boys not of genius, for dabbling by the brookside and keeping small fishes in tubs, —
There was a naughty boy
Tittlebat
And a naughty boy was he
Not over fat,
He kept little fishes
Minnow small
In washing tubs three
As the stal
In spite
Of a glove
Of the might
Not above
Of the Maid,
The size
Nor afraid
Of a nice
Of his Granny-good
Little Baby’s
He often would
Little finger —
Hurly burly
O he made
Get up early
’Twas his trade
And go
Of Fish a pretty kettle
By hook or crook
A kettle —
To the brook
A kettle —
And bring home
Of Fish a pretty kettle
Miller’s thumb,
A kettle!
In a later letter to his sister he makes much the same confession in a different key, when he bids her ask him for any kind of present she fancies, only not for live stock to be kept in captivity, ‘though I will not now be very severe on it, remembering how fond I used to be of Goldfinches, Tomtits, Minnows, Mice, Ticklebacks, Dace, Cock salmons and all the whole tribe of the Bushes and the Brooks.’ Despite the changes which have overbuilt and squalidly or sprucely suburbanized all those parts of Middlesex, the Pymmes brook still holds its course across half the county, is still bridged by the main street of Edmonton, and runs countrywise, clear and open, for some distance along a side street on its way to join the Lea. Other memories of it, and of his childish playings and musings beside it, find expression in Keats’ poetry where he makes the shepherd-prince Endymion tell his sister Peona how one of his lovesick vagaries has been to sit on a stone and bubble up the water through a reed, —
So reaching back to boyhood: make me ships Of moulted feathers, touchwood, alder chips, With leaves stuck in them; and the Neptune be Of their petty ocean.
If we learn little of Keats’ early days from his own lips, we have sufficient testimony as to the impression which he made on his school companions; which was that of a fiery, generous little fellow, handsome and passionate, vehement both in tears and laughter, and as placable and loveable as he was pugnacious. But beneath this bright and mettlesome outside there lay deep in his nature, even from the first, a strain of painful sensibility making him subject to moods of unreasonable suspicion and self-tormenting melancholy. These he was accustomed to conceal from all except his brothers, to whom he was attached by the very closest of fraternal ties. George, the second brother, had all John’s spirit of manliness and honour, with a less impulsive disposition and a cooler blood. From a boy he was the bigger and stronger of the two: and at school found himself continually involved in fights for, and not unfrequently with, his small, indomitably fiery senior. Tom, the youngest, was always delicate, and an object of protecting care as well as the warmest affection to the other two.
Here are some of George Keats’ recollections, written after the death of his elder brother, and referring partly to their school days and partly to John’s character after he was grown up:
I loved him from boyhood even when he wronged me, for the goodness of his heart and the nobleness of his spirit, before we left school we quarrelled often and fought fiercely, and I can safely say and my schoolfellows will bear witness that John’s temper was the cause of all, still we were more attached than brothers ever are.
From the time we were boys at school, where we loved, jangled, and fought alternately, until we separated in 1818, I in a great measure relieved him by continual sympathy, explanation, and inexhaustible spirits and good humour, from many a bitter fit of hypochondriasm. He avoided teazing any one with his miseries but Tom and myself, and often asked our forgiveness; venting and discussing them gave him relief.
Let us turn now from these honest and warm brotherly reminiscences to their confirmation in the words of two of Keats’ school friends; and first in those of his junior Edward Holmes, afterwards a musical critic of note and author of a well-known Life of Mozart: —
Keats was in childhood not attached to books. His penchant was for fighting. He would fight any one — morning, noon, and night, his brother among the rest. It was meat and drink to him. Jennings their sailor relation was always in the thoughts of the brothers, and they determined to keep up the family reputation for courage; George in a passive manner; John and Tom more fiercely. The favourites of John were few; after they were known to fight readily he seemed to prefer them for a sort of grotesque and buffoon humour. I recollect at this moment his delight at the extraordinary gesticulations and pranks of a boy named Wade who was celebrated for this…. He was a boy whom any one from his extraordinary vivacity and personal beauty might easily fancy would become great — but rather in some military capacity than in literature. You will remark that this taste came out rather suddenly and unexpectedly. Some books of his I remember reading were Robinson Crusoe and something about Montezuma and the Incas of Peru. He must have read Shakespeare as he thought that ‘no one would care to read Macbeth alone in a house at two o’clock in the morning.’ This seems to me a boyish trait of the poet. His sensibility was as remarkable as his indifference to be thought well of by the master as a ‘good boy’ and to his tasks in general…. He was in every way the creature of passion[3q]…. The point to be chiefly insisted on is that he was not literary — his love of books and poetry manifested itself chiefly about a year before he left school
