A Walk in Keats’s Footsteps
1.
In the late afternoon of Sunday, September 19, 1819, 23-year-old John Keats struck out for his daily walk from his lodging in Winchester, England. He’d arrived in the city a month prior, leaving behind southern England’s Isle of Wight for a change of scenery in the cathedral city of Winchester. It was, potentially, his farewell tour as a poet: one last gasp to get it right or forsake his art forever. “My purpose now is to make one more attempt in the Press,” Keats wrote to his friend Benjamin Haydon the previous June, “if that fail, ‘ye hear no more of me’ as Chaucer says.”
No matter that the previous month had been the most productive of his life—“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” and “Ode on Melancholy” are all believed to have been composed that May. In Keats’s view, he was a failure. Much of this sentiment was rooted in financial hardship; his lack of steady income not only prevented him from marrying his fiancé, Fanny Brawne, but also precluded him from bailing out his brother George from a bad business venture. Adding to his troubles was a slew of negative reviews for his 1818 poem “Endymion.” One critic described it as “imperturbable drivelling idiocy,” while another confessed that despite his “superhuman” attempts, he was unable to “struggle beyond the first of the four books.”
Under these dark clouds, Keats began his afternoon walk:
