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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Complete Poetry of John Keats," the reader is invited to explore the sublime and sensuous verses of one of the most celebrated poets of the Romantic era. This comprehensive compilation encompasses Keats's profound engagement with themes such as beauty, mortality, nature, and love, showcasing his unique blend of rich imagery and passionate lyricism. The collection documents Keats's aesthetic theory, heavily influenced by his admiration for art and experiences in nature, reflecting a deep understanding of the interplay between sensory perception and emotional response, making his work eternally relevant in the literary canon. John Keats, born in London in 1795, emerged as a pivotal figure in Romantic poetry despite his brief life, which ended at the age of 25. His background as a physician and his personal struggles with adversity and illness infused his work with a transcendental quality, bridging the corporeal and the spiritual. His letters reveal a keen intellect and a passionate devotion to the craft of poetry, illuminating his motivations rooted in a quest for beauty amidst human suffering. I highly recommend "The Complete Poetry of John Keats" not only to students of literature but to anyone seeking to connect with the essence of human experience through poetry. Keats's ability to articulate complex emotions with striking clarity makes this collection an essential addition to any literary collection, promising to evoke contemplation and appreciation long after the final page. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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The Complete Poetry of John Keats
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection presents, in one comprehensive gathering, the full range of John Keats’s poetry, from brief early exercises to the sustained achievements of his maturity. Its purpose is to allow readers to encounter the entire arc of his imaginative development within a single, continuous experience of voice and vision. Alongside the poems stands Sidney Colvin’s biographical study, which situates the verse within the pressures and friendships, ambitions and setbacks that shaped it. Together, these materials invite readers to trace how a singular talent refined its craft, broadened its sympathies, and pressed language toward an intensity of feeling and thought that remains distinctive in English literature.
The emphasis here is completeness rather than selection. By keeping the shorter lyrics in conversation with the long narratives and unfinished projects, the collection reveals not just highlights but the interdependence of experiment and accomplishment. Early pieces show the appetite for music and myth that later deepens into layered meditation; later poems illuminate how tentative beginnings were transformed by disciplined attention to form. The inclusion of fragments allows a rare glimpse of process—an imagination turning over possibilities, sometimes breaking off mid-gesture, yet leaving patterns that echo across the finished work. The result is a panoramic view of craft, aspiration, and evolving self-understanding.
Though unified by a single authorial voice, the contents span multiple poetic modes. Readers will find lyrics, odes, sonnets, narrative romances, and epic fragments, as well as songs, verse epistles, occasional verses, and conversational or dialogic pieces. There are imitations and a translation, playful parodies, stanzas in the manner of admired predecessors, and descriptive or topographical poems. Some works unfold in patterned stanzas; others move in the long-breathed cadences of blank verse. The presence of both finished poems and partial drafts makes this not only a repository of polished art but also a record of an artist persistently testing the resources of English prosody.
The narrative and epic undertakings gathered here show Keats measuring himself against expansive forms. Romance and legend give him space to explore desire, fate, and moral perplexity within richly imagined settings. The ambitious epic projects, though incomplete, display a concentrated seriousness about scope, character, and a sculptural clarity of line. These works combine story with reflection, balancing forward motion with episodes of dream, vision, and debate. Their incompletion is integral to their interest: they demonstrate a poet refining his aims, re-evaluating models, and carrying language toward a granitic elevation while retaining the sensuous textures that animate his more intimate lyrics.
The odes and sonnets form a complementary field of concentrated lyric thought. In the odes, meditative structure and rhetorical address cradle shifts of mood with poise, enabling sustained attention to art, nature, memory, and the mind’s self-divisions. The sonnets, whether Petrarchan, Shakespearean, or hybrid, condense argument and feeling into a closed space where pressure and release can be precisely timed. Across these forms, the speaker tests how perception alters value, how time alters perception, and how the imagination negotiates between inward intensity and the resistant grain of the world. These poems show compression without loss, resonance without excess.
A substantial portion of the volume consists of occasional and personal pieces that extend the poet’s range. Addresses to friends and fellow writers, poems sparked by travel or artworks, and light, experimental songs reveal a temperament simultaneously sociable and introspective. Playful or satiric poems sit beside earnest tributes, while imitations and a translation register an alertness to earlier voices and foreign cadences. Dialogues and fragments of dramatic or conversational design exhibit a flair for immediacy and exchange. Far from marginal, these works map the daily workshop of style, where cadence is tuned, images are tested, and feeling acquires public shape.
Across these varied forms, certain concerns provide continuity. Beauty is approached as something sensuous and palpable yet shadowed by change; joy and sorrow answer each other with unsettling proximity. Nature is not mere scenery but a medium for thinking—seasonal cycles, bird-song, and weather become measures of inward life. Artworks and stories are treated as living presences, inviting questions about memory, permanence, and the fate of human making. Sleep, dream, and reverie blur with waking attentiveness, while languor and energy alternate like the play of sun and cloud. The poems repeatedly test how much feeling language can bear without splitting.
The collection also documents a sustained conversation with tradition. Classical myth offers figures and narratives through which to probe desire, transformation, and loss. Renaissance models, especially those favoring elaborate stanzaic architectures, provide tests of musical memory and ornament. Engagements with contemporaries and predecessors—addressed by name or alluded to in form—situate the work within a living community of craft. Encounters with places and artworks become occasions to measure personal response against inherited story. Translation and imitation further underline an ethic of receptive creativity, in which influence is less constraint than aperture, opening onto new arrangements of image, cadence, and thought.
Keats’s stylistic hallmarks emerge with striking consistency. Diction tends toward a palpable richness, where texture, color, and flavor transmit themselves through sound. Synaesthetic crossings—touch inflecting sight, music shading fragrance—generate a sense of plenitude without obscuring contour. The metrical practice is flexible: firm enough to carry large structures, supple enough to drift into reverie. Rhyme is both binding and propulsive, often surprising without strain. In the longer poems, blank verse achieves sculpted clarity; in the shorter, stanzaic forms catch and release emotion with poised timing. Throughout, address—often in the second person—sharpens meditation into a shared, enacted experience.
Read together, these works demonstrate why Keats remains central to the study of English poetry. The poems offer an exacting sensitivity to sensation and form, while maintaining a philosophical poise that resists easy consolations. Their influence has been sustained not through programmatic doctrine but through craft: an ear for cadence, an eye for emblematic detail, and an openness to ambiguity. The long narratives expand what lyric feeling can accomplish at scale; the shorter pieces refine how thought can turn on a syllable. The corpus persists because it rewards re-reading, revealing fresh articulations of longing, clarity, and compassionate attention.
Because the collection presents both breadth and depth, it supports multiple paths of entry. One might move from intimate lyrics to the grander architectures and back again, or gather the odes and sonnets into their own constellation before venturing into narrative. The biographical study provides a framework for understanding the social and intellectual milieu in which the poems took shape, but the verse stands on its own, inviting patient, aural reading. However approached, the book encourages noticing continuities of image and cadence across disparate forms, and discovering how repeated motifs—season, music, night, dream—evolve with each new context.
The aim, finally, is to present a coherent portrait of a poetic imagination that never ceased to test its own capacities. The complete gathering shows an artist who could marry delicacy to strength, intimacy to amplitude, and who treated language as a medium for both sensuous delight and moral inquiry. Here, the playful and the grave are not opposites but partners; the fragment and the finished work illuminate each other. By making all of this available in one place, the collection offers not just access but perspective, allowing readers to feel the steady pressure of a single, unmistakable voice across many rooms.
Author Biography
John Keats (1795–1821) was a central figure of the second generation of English Romantic poetry, renowned for a concentrated burst of masterpieces written in his early twenties. Though his life was brief and his reputation contested during his lifetime, his lyric intensity, sensuous imagery, and philosophical poise made him a touchstone for later readers and writers. Keats fused classical myth with a distinctly modern meditation on time, beauty, and mortality, articulating an approach to poetic creation he called negative capability. Posthumously, he rose from a marginal, even mocked, Cockney presence to a canonical poet whose odes are staples of English literature.
Born in London to a family of modest means, Keats lost both parents in childhood and was educated at a progressive school in Enfield, where a sympathetic headmaster and his son encouraged his voracious reading. He admired Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, developing an early facility with sonnet and couplet. In his mid-teens he was apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon and later pursued hospital training in London, passing the examination that allowed him to practice. Yet literary ambition soon outweighed medicine. Immersion in classical texts, Renaissance art, and contemporary periodicals helped shape his taste as he moved from diligent student to aspiring professional poet.
His literary path accelerated after he entered the lively liberal circle around the journalist and poet Leigh Hunt, who printed early poems and offered guidance. Keats’s first book, Poems, appeared in the late 1810s and showed uneven promise alongside flashes of originality, including the admired sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer. He forged friendships with fellow writers and painters, attended lectures, and absorbed ideas about imagination and sensibility current among Romantic thinkers. At the same time, hostile reviewers grouped him with the Cockney School, deriding his class background and style—a campaign that sharpened his resolve but complicated his debut.
Keats published the ambitious romance Endymion the following year, framing mythic narrative as a proving ground for his evolving aesthetic. The poem opens with a celebrated line about beauty’s enduring joy, yet reviewers seized on what they saw as laxity and excess. After a strenuous walking tour of northern Britain, cut short by illness, he returned to care for an ailing sibling and settled in Hampstead with a close friend, circumstances that fostered concentration and craft. There he embarked on fragmentary epics—Hyperion and its recast The Fall of Hyperion—while experimenting across modes, including narrative romance and verse drama such as Otho the Great.
In 1819 he reached a pinnacle of lyric achievement, composing a cluster of odes—among them Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, Ode on Melancholy, and Ode on Indolence—alongside ballads and tales like La Belle Dame sans Merci and The Eve of St Agnes. These poems probe transience, desire, and artistic permanence through richly tactile language and delicately poised argument. His letters from this period articulate key critical ideas, notably negative capability, the capacity to dwell in uncertainties without irritable reaching after fact and reason. Craft sharpened, he pruned earlier extravagance for a more tensile, resonant style.
His final collection, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems, appeared in 1820 and was met with a warmer, though still mixed, reception, with some recognizing a leap in power and control. That year his health collapsed, and physicians advised a milder climate. He left England for Italy, where he was cared for by friends in Rome. A close attachment to Fanny Brawne marked his last London years and survives in compelling correspondence, but ill health curtailed plans for further work. Keats died in his mid-twenties, leaving unfinished projects and a body of poems and letters of striking maturity.
After his death, admirers and later poets steadily advanced his reputation, reading the odes as consummate studies in how art negotiates mortality and desire. Victorian writers and artists drew on his imagery, while critics in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries praised the letters for their insights into creativity and poetic process. Keats’s work became central to university curricula and to successive critical movements, from formalist close reading to more historical approaches. Today he is widely regarded as one of the finest lyric poets in English, his sensuous intelligence continuing to animate discussions of imagination, beauty, and the ethics of attention.
Historical Context
John Keats wrote in late Georgian Britain, during the Regency of George, Prince of Wales, and the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars (ended 1815). This was the high tide of British Romanticism, shaped by Wordsworth and Coleridge’s 1798 Lyrical Ballads, and counterpointed by the celebrity of Byron and the radical lyricism of Shelley. London was expanding rapidly, its print culture booming with magazines, circulating libraries, and salons. Industrialization and empire supplied both wealth and anxiety. In this climate, debates over taste, class, and politics intersected with aesthetics. Keats’s poems and fragments, odes and sonnets, are best read against this combustible mix of cultural aspiration and social ferment.
Keats was born on 31 October 1795 at the Swan and Hoop livery stables in Moorfields, London. Orphaned early—his father died in 1804 from a riding accident, his mother in 1810 of tuberculosis—he absorbed at John Clarke’s School in Enfield a humane curriculum emphasizing history, languages, and literature. Charles Cowden Clarke encouraged his immersion in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Chapman’s Homer, shaping his taste for luxuriant imagery and romance modes. Early friendships with George Felton Mathew and J. H. Reynolds fostered epistolary verse and exchanges that fed many occasional poems. The adolescent enthusiasm for Spenserian stanza, chivalric coloring, and mythic allusion structures work from Calidore to I Stood Tip-toe.
From 1811 Keats apprenticed to surgeon-apothecary Thomas Hammond in Edmonton, then in 1815 entered Guy’s Hospital, London. He passed the Apothecaries’ Hall examination in July 1816, qualifying for a medical career he soon relinquished. Hospital training grounded him in anatomy, observation, and the experience of suffering and mortality. That discipline informs the tactile exactness of his imagery and the moral stake of poems about transience and fear of oblivion, from On Death and When I have fears that I may cease to be to later odes on melancholy and indolence. The contrast between clinical fact and imaginative transport underwrites his reflections on the capacities and limits of the poetic mind.
Leigh Hunt’s liberal circle drew Keats decisively into the literary public sphere. In December 1816 The Examiner printed On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, celebrating a night’s shared discovery with Cowden Clarke and announcing Keats to metropolitan readers. Hunt had been imprisoned in 1813–1815 for criticizing the Prince Regent, and Keats’s Written on the Day That Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison signals an early political sympathy. Through Hunt and painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, Keats met writers such as Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, and Reynolds, joining a culture of salons, album verse, and friendly set pieces. Poems addressed to friends and patrons, and to Haydon and other artists, crystallize this sociable milieu.
Britain’s classical revival, sharpened by heated debate over Lord Elgin’s removal of Parthenon sculptures (acquired by the British Museum in 1816), fed Keats’s fascination with Greece. He visited the marbles in 1817 and wrote On Seeing the Elgin Marbles, a touchstone for the tension between aesthetic exaltation and human frailty. Greek myth saturates Lamia, Hyperion, the Hymn and Ode to Apollo, the nightingale’s imagined Hellenic company, and the address to Homer. Regency philhellenism, soon to intersect with the Greek War of Independence (1821), made antiquity feel both politically charged and spiritually restorative, a double charge that Keats channels into art objects, visionary landscapes, and ethical tests for the imagination.
Keats’s first volume, Poems, appeared with C. and J. Ollier in March 1817, amid a London market primed for novelty yet ruled by sharp reviewers. In letters of 1817 he theorized Negative Capability, the poet’s capacity to dwell in uncertainties without irritable reaching after fact and reason, a stance that steadies the odes and sonnets alike. He experimented with Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets, compressed argumentative forms that become sites for self-correction and formal play, as in On the Sonnet and As from the darkening gloom a silver dove. Spenserian stanza and induction fragments signaled his ambition to renovate romance while testing the ethical depth of luxuriant sensation.
Endymion, begun on the Isle of Wight in April 1817 and finished at Burford Bridge that November, was published by Taylor and Hessey in April 1818. Keats’s apologetic preface frames the poem as an experiment in strenuous growth. Conservative reviewers pounced. Blackwood’s Magazine and the Quarterly Review mocked his style and origins, branding him a member of the Cockney School tied to Hunt’s politics and diction. Class prejudice fused with taste-making power to inflict real damage. The backlash shadows later defenses of poetic dignity, yet the setback spurred technical refinement, a firmer commitment to inward testing of truth, and a turn toward compact lyric structures and austere epic experiment.
In summer 1818 Keats and Charles Armitage Brown undertook a walking tour through the Lake District and Scotland, with a brief crossing to Ireland. They visited Burns’s birthplace at Alloway and tomb at Dumfries, Ailsa Craig in the Firth of Clyde, the Hebridean island of Staffa with Fingal’s Cave, and ascended Ben Nevis. Travel notes surface in sonnets and dialogues on Staffa, Ailsa Rock, and Ben Nevis, and in reflections on national bardic legacy. Exposure, fatigue, and a sore throat curtailed the tour, but the journey widened his sense of British and Celtic landscapes, the music of the bagpipe, and the fraught relation between fame, nation, and poetic vocation.
Returning to London, Keats nursed his brother Tom, who died of tuberculosis on 1 December 1818 at Hampstead. Keats then lodged at Wentworth Place, Hampstead, with Brown, entering the Dilke-Brown-Woodhouse circle that safeguarded manuscripts and morale. There he met Fanny Brawne, whose presence suffuses lyrics, epistolary poems, and love sonnets, including Bright star! and addresses to Fanny. The domestic garden, Hampstead Heath, and nearby Highgate made a counterworld to city pressures. Grief, precarious finances, and fragile health intersected with intense productivity. Poems to friends, lines to ladies, and the album culture evident across the oeuvre reflect both social tact and an ethic of intimate, sustaining companionship.
The spring and autumn of 1819 yielded a sequence of major odes that distill aesthetic, philosophical, and historical pressures. Ode to a Nightingale, likely composed at Wentworth Place after hearing a bird in Brown’s garden, interrogates the longing to dissolve into song. Ode on a Grecian Urn transforms the era’s connoisseurial gaze into a meditation on time and beauty. Melancholy and Indolence refine a moral psychology of desire and renunciation. Psyche reimagines a pagan cult as private devotion. To Autumn, written in September in or near Winchester, serenely gathers reaping, sound, and light while quietly registering social unease. The ode form itself becomes Keats’s instrument of thinking.
Alongside the odes, 1819 produced narrative and ballad experiments that align with Romantic medievalism and the contemporary vogue for Scott’s romances. Isabella adapts Boccaccio’s tale of love and mercantile violence into a critique of counting-house ethics. The Eve of St. Agnes, with its stained-glass atmosphere and ritual lore, explores imagination’s power amid social constraint. Lamia sets classical metamorphosis against cold philosophy. La Belle Dame Sans Merci compresses desire, illusion, and waste into a folk-like cadence. These works converse with earlier English traditions—from Chaucer and Spenser to the Elizabethan dramatists—and with modern taste for gothic settings, while probing how story can test and tutor feeling.
Hyperion, drafted in 1818–1819, renews the epic claim in blank verse, consciously measuring itself against Milton. Its Titanomachy, the fall of the old gods to the Olympians, allegorizes historical change and the painful ascent to a higher imaginative order. Dissatisfied with its grand manner, Keats recast the effort as The Fall of Hyperion in 1819, a visionary fragment where a dreaming poet confronts the ethics of pity and the endurance of suffering. This turn from public epic to inward trial mirrors Keats’s broader trajectory, condensing his apprenticeship’s lessons about ambition, humility, and the vocation of the poet. Neither poem appeared complete in his lifetime; Hyperion was printed as a fragment in 1820.
Postwar Britain was turbulent: economic slump, the Corn Laws of 1815, and demands for parliamentary reform culminated in the Peterloo Massacre at St Peter’s Field, Manchester, on 16 August 1819, followed by the repressive Six Acts. Keats’s circle at The Examiner and in Hunt’s salon leaned reformist, wary of courtly taste and patronage. Although not a political pamphleteer, Keats registers the climate obliquely. To Kosciusko invokes a European emblem of liberty; On Peace and sonnets on superstition and public vulgarity touch civic nerve; To Autumn’s poised harvest music has often been heard against 1819’s anxious soundscape. His poems insist that ethical clarity can sound through beauty’s measured forms.
Keats worked within a shifting literary economy, moving from aristocratic patronage toward professional authorship. C. and J. Ollier brought out his 1817 volume; Taylor and Hessey backed Endymion and the 1820 collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, which also printed the odes and Hyperion fragment. Periodicals such as The Examiner and later Hunt’s Indicator published sonnets, ballads, and occasional pieces, including early versions of La Belle Dame Sans Merci. Richard Woodhouse, Taylor’s reader, preserved manuscripts and sketched a critical defence. Rival magazines—Blackwood’s and the Quarterly—illustrate the era’s combative reviewing culture. Keats’s addresses to Spenser, Homer, and Byron stage lineage claims within this crowded marketplace.
Illness, already intimate through family loss, struck Keats directly in February 1820, when he coughed arterial blood and recognized the sentence of consumption. Advised to seek a warmer climate, he sailed from London on 17 September 1820 aboard the Maria Crowther with the painter Joseph Severn, endured quarantine in the Bay of Naples, and settled by November in Rome, under the care of Dr James Clark near the Spanish Steps. He died on 23 February 1821, aged twenty-five, and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery. That mortal horizon concentrates in late lyrics and sonnets to sleep, fame, and steadfastness, and clarifies the stoic tenderness of the 1819 meditations on joy and grief.
Keats’s afterlife traces a Victorian arc from scandal to sanctity. Shelley’s Adonais (1821) enshrined him as martyred genius; Byron’s tart lines in Don Juan registered the review-legend that critics killed him. The decisive rehabilitation came with Lord Houghton’s Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848), which opened the correspondence to public view. Later scholarly editions by H. Buxton Forman and the British Museum’s curatorial culture anchored texts and reputation. Sidney Colvin’s Life of John Keats (1887) supplied an authoritative narrative of growth, friends, and influences, shaping how subsequent readers encounter the oeuvre. The inclusion of Colvin’s biography in this collection acknowledges reception history as part of context.
Keats’s oeuvre constellates metropolitan modernity and older worlds. London’s theatres, taverns, and museums meet rural England’s hedgerows and harvests; British imperial collecting frames Greek and Italian longings; science, surgery, and empirical exactness temper dream and myth. Friendships and family networks matter: George Keats emigrated to America in 1818, marrying Georgiana Wylie, prompting poems of prophecy and address across the Atlantic. Album culture and gifts, from laurel crowns to shells, register female readerships and sociability. Across sonnet, ode, ballad, romance, and epic fragment, Keats tests whether beauty can sustain ethical intelligence. The historical pressures named here—political, economic, and cultural—bear upon all the works gathered in this complete poetry.
Synopsis (Selection)
Life of John Keats (Sidney Colvin)
A compact nineteenth-century biography outlining Keats’s upbringing, circle, travels, illness, and early death, with an overview of his poetic development and reception.
Endymion (Books I–IV)
A mythic romance in which the shepherd Endymion quested for an ideal moon-maiden through visionary realms, testing the sustaining power of beauty against doubt and ordeal.
Hyperion (Books I–III)
An unfinished Miltonic epic portraying the fallen Titans, Hyperion’s waning hope, and Apollo’s dawning ascendancy, meditating on loss, renewal, and poetic succession.
The Fall of Hyperion
A radical recasting of the Hyperion material framed as a visionary trial before Moneta, weighing dream against duty and the poet’s ethical relation to suffering.
Lamia (Parts I–II)
A classical tale of enchantment and disillusion in which Lycius’s love for the serpent-woman Lamia is undone by rational exposure.
Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil
A tragic romance of love thwarted by mercenary violence, culminating in macabre devotion and an implicit critique of commercial cruelty.
The Eve of St. Agnes
A richly atmospheric romance where lovers exploit a folk ritual to flee a hostile household, balancing sensuous pageantry with danger.
La Belle Dame sans Merci
A stark ballad of enthrallment and abandonment, as a knight recounts how a mysterious lady led him into a desolate waking dream.
The Great Odes (Ode on a Grecian Urn; Ode to a Nightingale; Ode on Melancholy; Ode on Indolence; Ode to Psyche; To Autumn)
A suite of meditations that test imagination and art against transience and grief, moving from visionary transport to tempered acceptance of change and mortality.
Other Odes (Ode; Ode to Apollo; Ode to Fanny; Fragment of an Ode to Maia)
Occasional addresses blending classical homage and personal feeling, invoking patron deities or a beloved to reflect on desire, creativity, and repose.
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
A sonnet capturing the shock of discovery on first reading Homer in Chapman’s translation, likened to sighting a new planet or ocean.
Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art
A love sonnet longing for star-like constancy amid human change, poised between the wish for permanence and the reality of mortal breath.
On Seeing the Elgin Marbles
A sonnet confronting ancient grandeur that sharpens awareness of mortality even as it exalts the imagination.
Sleep and Poetry
A youthful ars poetica that celebrates sensuous fancy while resolving to engage deeper human passions and public themes.
I Stood Tip-toe upon a Little Hill
An exuberant landscape meditation tracing how natural detail quickens myth-making and the felt origin of poetic vision.
Fancy and Spenserian Experiments (Fancy; A Draught of Sunshine; Imitation of Spenser; Specimen of an Induction to a Poem; Calidore; The Poet – A Fragment; Spenserian Stanza; Spenserian Stanzas on Charles Armitage Brown; Stanzas; Stanzas to Miss Wylie; Sharing Eve’s Apple)
Pastoral and chivalric pieces that revel in light-footed imagination and ornate style, exploring pleasure, friendship, and make-believe as laboratories for craft.
Mythic Vignettes and Invocations (Apollo and the Graces; O! Were I one of the Olympian twelve; Hymn to Apollo; Addressed to the Same)
Brief mythological set-pieces and hymns that salute classical figures, using playful or ceremonial tones to frame artistic aspiration.
Sonnets — Love, Time, and Mortality (When I have fears…; Why did I laugh tonight?…; The Human Seasons; To Sleep; Oh! how I love…; Sonnet to Fanny)
Meditations that balance desire and ambition against time’s limits, oscillating between rapture, anxiety, and stoic poise.
Sonnets — Literary Homage and Reading (To Homer; On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again; On Leigh Hunt’s ‘Rimini’; A Dream after Dante; Sonnet on the Sonnet; To Spenser; To Byron; Translation from Ronsard; As from the darkening gloom…)
Tributes and responses that measure vocation against revered authors and forms, turning encounters with art into self-definition.
Sonnets — Places and Journeys (Written upon the Top of Ben Nevis; To the Nile; On the Sea; To Ailsa Rock; On Visiting the Tomb of Burns; Written in the Cottage where Burns was Born; On Hearing the Bagpipe; On Peace)
Travel and place-pieces registering wonder, history, and mood through landscapes and monuments, often linking nature to cultural memory.
Sonnets — Personal, Occasional, and Social (To a Cat; To John Hamilton Reynolds; Written in Answer to a Sonnet…; This pleasant tale is like a little copse; To a Lady Seen at Vauxhall; Before he went to feed with owls and bats; On a Picture of Leander; Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition; How Many Bards Gild the Lapses of Time!)
Brief addresses and topical sketches that mix wit with candor, charting friendships, irritants, and self-reflection.
Poems to Fanny Brawne (Ode to Fanny; Lines to Fanny; Lines Supposed to Have Been Addressed to Fanny Brawne; Sonnet to Fanny)
Intimate lyrics of ardor, jealousy, and vulnerability that trace the pressures of love under illness and separation.
Nature and Travel Poems (Staffa; Ben Nevis – a Dialogue; Teignmouth; Dawlish Fair; Lines Written in the Highlands…; To One Who Has Been Long in City Pent; Keen, Fitful Gusts…; O Solitude!; On the Grasshopper and Cricket)
Observational pieces where weather, geology, and place shape mood, from urban claustrophobia relieved by nature to awe before sublime formations.
Friendship, Art, and the Literary Circle (Addressed to Haydon; To Haydon; On Leaving Some Friends at an Early Hour; Lines On Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair; To Charles Cowden Clarke; To George Felton Mathew; Written on the Day That Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison; On Receiving a Laurel Crown from Leigh Hunt; To the Ladies who Saw Me Crown’d; On Receiving a Curious Shell…; Addressed to the Same; To a Friend Who Sent Me Some Roses)
Occasional tributes and thank-offerings that honor mentors, comrades, and convivial moments in Keats’s artistic milieu.
Epistles and Family Verse Letters (Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds; Epistles; To My Brothers; To My Brother George [both]; To G. A. W.; To Some Ladies; A Prophecy: to George Keats in America; To George Felton Mathew)
Informal verse letters that mingle autobiography, travel and domestic news, and evolving poetics in a candid, companionable register.
Songs and Airs (Faery Songs; Folly’s Song; Daisy’s Song; What the Thrush Said; Song: Hush, hush!…; The stranger lighted…; I had a dove…; A Song of Opposites; A Song About Myself; A Galloway Song; Song: Spirit here that reignest!; Fill for me a brimming bowl)
Short, musical pieces ranging from fairy lore and playful self-portrait to tender complaint and conviviality.
Ballads and Narrative Fragments (Robin Hood; Meg Merrilies; The Eve of Saint Mark; The Castle Builder – Fragments of a Dialogue; A Party of Lovers)
Compact narratives and sketches that rework folklore, village life, and nocturnal scenes with sensuous detail and hints of suspense.
The Cap and Bells; or, The Jealousies
A comic fairy-tale romance that satirizes courtly love and jealous intrigue in a glittering, whimsical setting.
Public and Patriotic Poems (To Kosciusko; Happy is England! I Could Be Content; On Peace)
Occasional pieces saluting liberty and national feeling, cautious yet hopeful about political ideals.
Witty, Parodic, and Occasional Verse (Modern Love; Women, Wine, and Snuff; On Oxford — A Parody; Acrostic; An Extempore; You Say You Love; Two or Three; The Gadfly)
Light and often humorous verses that toy with courtship, convivial excess, and literary in-jokes.
Meditations on Death, Hope, and Fame (On Death; To Hope; Fame, like a wayward Giri, will still be coy; The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!; Oh, I am frighten’d with most hateful thoughts!; How fever’d is the man, who cannot look)
Short reflective lyrics weighing despair against consolation and ambition against humility as day or spirit wanes.
Lines on the Mermaid Tavern
A convivial lyric praising the imagined fellowship of Elizabethan writers at the Mermaid, contrasting present sociability with a storied golden age.
Untitled Address Poems (‘To —’, ‘To’, etc.)
Brief dedicatory or amatory pieces to unnamed recipients, offering compliments, wishes, or appeals in polished miniature.
The Complete Poetry of John Keats
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, 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.
