John Keats: Poetry, Life & Landscapes

By Suzie Grogan

“This is a celebratory meld of memoir, biography and travelogue, intensely personal and all the better for it.” —Eleanor Fitzsimons, author of Wilde’s Women

John Keats is one of Britain’s best-known and most-loved poets. Despite dying in Rome in 1821, at the age of just twenty-five, his poems continue to inspire generations who reinterpret and reinvent the ways in which we consume his work.

Apart from his long association with Hampstead, North London, he has not previously been known as a poet of ‘place’ in the way we associate Wordsworth with the Lake District, for example, and for many years readers considered Keats’s work remote from political and social context. Yet Keats was acutely aware of and influenced by his surroundings: Hampstead; Guy’s Hospital in London where he trained as a doctor; Teignmouth where he nursed his brother Tom; a walking tour of the Lake District and Scotland; the Isle of Wight; the area around Chichester and in Winchester, where his last great ode, “To Autumn,” was composed.

Suzie Grogan takes the reader on a journey through Keats’s life and landscapes, introducing us to his best and most influential work. Utilizing primary sources such as Keats’s letters to friends and family and the very latest biographical and academic work, it offers an accessible way to see Keats through the lens of the places he visited and aims to spark a lasting interest in the real Keats—the poet and the man.

“Warm and worthwhile observations on how places as varied as the Lake District and the Isle of Wight shaped Keats’s verse.” —Camden New Journal

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526739384

Book preview

Introduction

John Keats died 200 years ago, in 1821. Aged just 25, he spent his last months in Rome having travelled from London with his friend, Joseph Severn, in an attempt to benefit from the warmer climate. He had tuberculosis in its final stages. When he left Hampstead in the previous September he had sensed he would never see England again and, despite a brief rally, the disease took his life, as it had taken his mother’s when he was just fourteen and his brother Tom’s in 1818. He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.

The bicentenary of his death has been celebrated in the two years up to 2021, recognising the significance of the very brief period within which nearly all the poetry for which he is best remembered was written. His poetic development and his output between late 1818 and 1819 has been referred to as Keats’s ‘living year’ (Gittings, 1954) and the commemoration is a reminder that Keats’s life is not about his death at all. For many years, he was viewed as the archetypal Romantic figure, a frail young man, cruelly cut down in his prime, possibly because the critics were harsh and his work unrecognised in his lifetime. His friends did little to change that view, and it is only since the second half of the twentieth century that a different and more accurate picture has emerged. The Keats celebrated today was an energetic and brilliant man who ranks alongside the greatest writers in literary history. His popularity outstrips that of his contemporaries such as Byron and his work inspires younger generations to reimagine his great works in music, art and film, as well as poetry.

There will be many books and papers published celebrating these past 200 years. There are already great biographies – the most recent by Nicholas Roe and Andrew Motion – and research that takes us into the life of Keats, the poet and the correspondent. Keats’s letters are as moving as his poetry and full of a wisdom and philosophy that make them an invaluable resource alongside the poetry as evidence of his development as man and poet.

Many academics have spent their working lives reflecting on individual poems and letters in the minutest detail. A simple Google search will offer hundreds of options for further reading, depending on your level of interest and present knowledge. It will also bring up blog posts I have written, for my own, or for the Wordsworth Trust ‘Romanticism’ blog. I have studied Keats from the age of 12 when I was first drawn into his story by a ‘Blue Peter Special Assignment’ on BBC1 in the mid-1970s. I bought my first book of his poems in Totnes, Devon with my precious holiday money and a biography – by the wonderful Robert Gittings (first published in 1968) – a year later. I studied him at A level for an English Literature exam that I passed with an ‘A’ only because I had out-of-school lessons from a wonderful elderly lady who had mastered the teaching of poetry much better than my English teachers. Inspiring young adults to study poetry in schools has always been difficult.

From then on, I have taken John Keats with me through both good and very bad times. He was with me through adolescent angst and through the joys of marriage and children. His work would be the first I turned to when I was diagnosed with cancer aged just 44 and through the loss of my parents 25 years apart. He has walked beside me during bouts of depression and anxiety, and helped me come to see that the nature of the human condition is to challenge and question, and seek beauty in everything; to live in the moment and appreciate even the smallest everyday occurrence.

I scarcely remember counting upon any happiness—I look for it if it be not in the present hour,—nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel. (Letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817)

Some of those ‘new’ inspirational quotes on social media aren’t recent or original. Keats himself said, ‘We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the Author’. In this book I will seek to illustrate how walking in Keats’s footsteps can illuminate the ways in which he speaks to, and for, us across the two centuries since his death.

Did you know, for example, that far from the stereotypical swooning Romantic poet many believed him to be in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, he was broad-shouldered and pugnacious, a man to have on your side in a fight? His face was lively and his eyes bright and he captured the hearts of many of his friends with his sense of humour and generosity of spirit, along with a willingness to lend them money when he barely had any himself.

I would always advise even the most cynical person to find a poet who speaks to them as Keats does to me. Poetry distils the very essence of what it means to be human and to experience the joy, pain and occasionally sheer routine of being alive. It is not mere dreaming. It comes from somewhere deep but is influenced by daily events of personal, local and national importance. It is often most inspired by place; not necessarily a grand house or sublime view (although there are many poems by Keats and others moved by a mountain top or the home of an idol) but somewhere and something that touches the heart – hearing birdsong in a garden on a summer’s evening, watching the flames in the hearth and feeling ‘home’.

In our formative years, we are often required to read poetry, out of context and without biography. This isn’t always important, but it is why so many still think of Keats as a poet ‘out of this world’, alive only as he reads the classics and dreams of the past. His place as a poet of history, as someone affected by momentous contemporary events – of which there were many in that early part of the nineteenth century – has been established now, by recent biographers and academics such as Nicholas Roe and Richard Marggraf Turley. But the myth lingers of the consumptive youth, lying limp on a sofa in Hampstead and being nursed in Rome. One aim of this book is to challenge any lazy stereotypes.

This book is aimed at anyone who wants to know more about the places Keats visited, the times he lived through and the influences they may have had on his poetry. What were social conditions like in Moorgate, Enfield and Edmonton where Keats spent much of his youth? Where was he when his finest work was written, and how are those places reflected in the work? What else was happening in the world when Keats was in Winchester writing Ode to Autumn? This isn’t a Keats crammer; it won’t analyse in detail but will offer a ‘way in’ to his life and work. It will reference the letters and poems and research by others which can take each example further, should the reader be interested. The aim is to spark an interest not just in Keats, but in new ways of looking at poetry or work by other creative people. They don’t exist in a vacuum. In a twenty-first century world which seems to suggest that only the individual rather than the collective good is important, this book hopes to suggest that there is always a wider view out there and that even the individual can speak to the many.

John Keats is most associated with Hampstead in north-west London, but he lived in other parts of the capital and visited places as far apart as Teignmouth in South Devon and Cromarty in the north of Scotland. He is a poet of movement, of experience and of life. We will travel with him there in these pages. He also refined his art, studied and developed as a poet in Kent, Oxford, the Isle of Wight, the Lake District and West Sussex. Each of these places offered him time to consider not just his own work, but his dedication to poetry as a career and his place in the pantheon of English poetry. His letters to friends and family, beginning in 1814, are packed full of his impressions of time and place and the impact on his mood, his ability to write and to feel more or less confident in his work.

From a damp Devon to an Isle of Wight packed full of soldiers; from the top of Ben Nevis to the Vale of Health in Hampstead; he takes us with him and offers us a philosophy of poetry and a social history of Britain in the Georgian era. I am following him here, as far as is possible, to highlight what he means to me, and to others, as a poet and as a man and why he remains relevant 200 years after his death.

We will look at his travels in a broadly chronological way, although this is not always easy with reference to particular places, some of which he visited more than once. Other characters will be introduced along the way; particularly his brothers and sister, George, Tom and Fanny and his friends, to whom he wrote the letters and poems that have cemented his reputation as a great writer as well as a poet.

Part of the remit of this book then is to look at our image of the poet. To learn the basics and build our relationship with him. Who will be ‘your’ Keats? Once you know the background, it is just as valuable to read him and take the poems at face value, as meaning what they appear to mean to the general reader, as it is to analyse them and continue to reinterpret them. I will also seek to highlight how valuable are his letters as a means of understanding him, his philosophy of life, his inspiration and the importance of his relationships

As an author, I cannot say ‘‘read Keats’s poetry, you’ll adore him, he is relevant to every aspect of your life’’. However, I can say, read this book and decide whether you want to find out more about the man behind the poetry, (only a small selection of poems can be included here). Even if you are not interested in his work, his life was remarkable, his relationships intense and his love for Fanny Brawne, in his final two years, eternal and passionate.

I can also say, with confidence, ‘‘read poetry; it is relevant to every aspect of your life". Find Keats, and then find others. Read poetry aloud to yourself and hear and feel the words in your mouth. Try ‘Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,/ And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul’ (from To Sleep), or ‘With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, / And purple-stained mouth’ (from Ode to a Nightingale). The second half of The Eve of St Agnes was thought too shockingly sensual for women to read, so let that pique your interest.

Lastly, of course, there is Fanny Brawne for whom he experienced a love so intense it threatened his health and his future as a poet. She kept every letter he wrote to her and when, only after her death, they were published in 1878, they shocked a Victorian society whose growing love of a swooning Keats was shaken by the intensity and vulnerability they expressed, to a woman they knew nothing about.

If you know little about John Keats, then perhaps turn to the second section of the book before we start following in his footsteps. It offers a detailed timeline of his life and work, pen portraits of the most important people in his life and a selection of his poetry. When writing this book I wanted to walk straight up to Keats and start us on our journey with him right away, but if you need more background, I have provided it, and he will still be here waiting to begin when you are ready.

The towns and cities he visited are very different today, but still, in the main, with a little something of Keats left behind. It is interesting to consider what Keats means to them, alongside their influence on him. Some celebrate Keats as part of their tourism offer, whilst others are less eager to claim him. However, as we commemorate his bicentenary, this is all about what he can mean to us, now and on into future decades. Let us start the journey…

SECTION 1

IN KEATS’S FOOTSTEPS

1

Who are we following? John Keats: image or imagination?

Even if we are, as we turn these pages, only metaphorically following in the footsteps of John Keats, we need to make some attempt to recognise him, before he gets lost in the crowded streets of central London, or takes a turning across a Hampstead field we are unfamiliar with.

I have written a blog post for The Wordsworth Trust, called ‘Picturing John Keats’, originally published on my own blog with the subtitle ‘Image or Imagination?’. The response received has given me great pleasure, and reinforced my belief that, whether independent scholar, academic or reader for simple pleasure, we all form a picture in our minds of the person behind the words. Indeed, forming that picture should be encouraged, to ensure we do not lose sight of their existence in the real world, with all the heartaches, happiness and mundanity that involves. With John Keats, we are fortunate. His own letters give us clues, his friends wrote of him to each other in later years and we have portraits, miniatures and life and death masks to offer a physical appearance.

So who is ‘our’ Keats, as we read on?

John Keats has been viewed by many as the very picture of the Romantic poet, destined to die poor and at a young age. He was a man who attracted a devoted group of friends who in many ways promoted that image after his death. Disgusted at the treatment he received from prominent literary critics of the early nineteenth century, some suggested that his constitution had been weakened by these attacks. Shelley wrote the poem Adonais, portraying Keats as victim; Byron, hugely popular at the time and disliked by Keats, wrote disparagingly of him as ‘snuffed out by an article’ and later in the nineteenth century Oscar Wilde, in his poem On the Grave of Keats still spoke of him as a martyr. Thus the perception of Keats as the archetypal frail, sensitive poet became enshrined in nineteenth and early twentieth-century consciousness.

John Keats was born in 1795, the eldest son of the manager of the Swan & Hoop stables and inn, Moorgate, now on the main route into the City of London. It was a status in a class-ridden poetic society rather cemented by his qualification as an apothecary (still seen as ‘trade’) than improved, and ‘class’ would be an arrow aimed regularly at him by critics and poets such as Byron. He would not have spoken with the public school or theatrical accent used by most of the readers of his work to be found on YouTube, but with an accent undoubtedly influenced by his parents and those working in the stables around him.

We don’t have any paintings or sketches of him as a child so it is hard to visualise him crossing the fields of Enfield and Edmonton, walking to Clarke’s School or home to his grandmother Jennings’s house. However, later descriptions of his school days suggest he was muscular and small. He would never grow much above five feet tall, which pained him at times, but it never prevented his being ready to ‘fight anyone morning noon and night’, as a schoolboy contemporary, Edward Homes recalled. Keats was well known as having a quick temper and always ready to fight his, or another boy’s, corner.

Similarly we cannot see him as a teenager, undertaking his apprenticeship with Thomas Hammond, Apothecary, of Edmonton. It was an unhappy period of his life and having lost both his father and more recently his mother, he was a challenging pupil. As he left his teens, though, and during his period as a medical student, he had clearly matured into a striking young man, attractive to women. Caroline Mathew, sister of an early poet friend George Felton Mathew saw him as ‘ebullient and outgoing’, with a ‘fine flow of animal spirits’ and a ‘very beautiful countenance’. His character was ‘warm and enthusiastic’ and there is a suggestion of a brief romance between the two. Her brother George thought that ‘a painter or sculptor might have taken him for a study after the Greek masters’.

At about the same time, however, as he struggled to develop a poetic voice whilst continuing his studies at medical school, he wrote a sonnet that begins:

Had I a man’s fair form, then might my sighs

Be echoed swiftly through that ivory shell

Thine ear, and find thy gentle heart; so well

Would passion arm me for the enterprize;

But ah! I am no knight whose foeman dies;

No cuirass glistens on my bosom’s swell;

I am no happy shepherd of the dell

Whose lips have trembled with a maiden’s eyes.’

This does not suggest confidence or arrogance about his appearance. Whilst he may have adopted a characteristically ‘poetic’ form of dress, growing a moustache, turning down his collar and tying a ribbon around his neck ‘à la Byron’ (as opposed to the current fashions for high collars and neckerchiefs) he was clearly still self-conscious and unaware of the charisma that drew so many to him. Later, he would often analyse his complex relationship with women, writing with similar self-deprecation to Benjamin Bailey, 18-22 July 1818, ‘I do think better of Womankind than to suppose they care whether Mister John Keats five feet hight [sic] likes them or not.’

Henry Stephens (later the inventor of the famous ink of the same name) lodged with Keats when studying medicine and later recalled that Keats was ‘swift-witted’ and offered an early physical description. Keats had a ‘thin face, prominent cheekbones, well-formed nose and receding forehead’. He considered his look ‘more of the Poet than the Philosopher’. This was generous from a man who later wrote disparagingly of Keats as medical man and poet, perhaps influenced by the fact that Keats passed his exams first time whilst he did not.

Later we will follow ‘swift-witted’ but ‘aloof’ Keats, with chin raised, fluffy moustache on his top lip and large observant eyes, around the wards of Guy’s Hospital and there we will see a young man barely out of his teens against a backdrop of some kind of hell. Keats was intense and acutely sensitive and alive to the world but he was not ‘unworldly’. Training as a doctor at Guy’s Hospital, when surgery was in its infancy and savage to a degree we can barely imagine, he would have witnessed suffering that intensified feeling and offered grim source material for his later poetry. We won’t be watching a young man likely to be rendered incapable of coping with the barbs thrown at him by the press, however angry he may have felt.

At this point, it is tempting to wonder how Keats spoke. Of course, unlike the scratchy recordings we have of other nineteenth century poets such as Tennyson, we have nothing to even hint at his real voice. Recent readings of his poetry by famous actors, available on YouTube, for example, tend to the plummy ‘posh’ or RADA pronunciation. Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hiddleston, for example, offer wonderful readings in mellifluous tones, but they surely do not sound like a young man in his early twenties from a pub in central London. An interesting article in the New York Times of October 2009, by Micah Lidberg, reflects on this very topic in light of the then newly released film Bright Star, directed by Jane Campion. Like Lidberg, I was struck by how like the dialogue of the period the script was; it was presented in an authentic way by the lead actors, Ben Whishaw as Keats and Abbie Cornish as Fanny Brawne. Some of what Keats says comes from his letters, and as Lidberg points out, Campion peppers the script with references and words that Keats himself uses, even as she puts them in the mouths of other characters.

Harsh critics accused Keats of ‘Cockney rhymes’, and we could, therefore, assume a cockney accent, especially as some of his spelling suggests he is writing, obviously quickly and conversationally, as he speaks. However, as Lidberg points out, other poets such as Blake and Tennyson used similar examples which suggests that with an ear for dialect, Keats would have made sure he was not embarrassed in his many and varied conversations with his peers. He himself wrote of identifying with others present in any room he entered.

A friend once commented that Keats read his own poetry badly, but others found his readings captivating, ‘tremulous’. I have to admit that my favourite recitals of the poems are by Ben Whishaw, as Keats. He seems to me to have adopted an unaffected tone, without unnecessary theatricality, pomp or drama. Of course, this is all imagination; we will never know.

As yet, we do not see a frail archetype. Later, written descriptions of Keats are offered by a number of friends and acquaintances in the ‘Keats Circle’ and not one of them suggests frailty or weakness. The poet Barry Cornwall (real name Bryan Procter) claimed he had ‘never met a more manly and simple young man’. Charles Brown, the close friend with whom he lived for much of his writing life, described him as ‘though thin, rather muscular’. He had auburn or brown hair and hazel eyes and a ‘peculiarly dauntless expression’, Joseph Severn noted, all ‘trembling eagerness’. His Oxford friend, Benjamin Bailey, like Mathew, considered ‘… the form of his head was like that of a fine Greek statue’. Others suggested he had an ‘inward’ contemplative look. These, I think, are those later remembered memories that idealised Keats; as Stanley Plumly says in the marvellous Posthumous Keats, the descriptions were ‘postponed, elevated or distorted by memory, even grief’. Poet Andrew Motion, Keats’s biographer, suggests that all these descriptions amount to a picture of a man at once ‘feminine and robust’.

As a younger reader, I was not familiar with these descriptions, and ‘my Keats’ was influenced by the images available in books, or on display at Wentworth Place (now known as Keats House) in Hampstead. Of course, we are now allowed even greater access via many internet sites, but in addition to the classic poses, we are offered any number of weakened imitations, produced posthumously and infected with that ‘ideal’ of the sensitive and ‘poetic’, the ‘Romantic’. There are some hideous offerings; some are rotated, or reimagined by fans and professionals alike, suggesting Keats looked anything from twelve to perhaps forty. Some are given the wrong attribution,

Reviews for John Keats

[pomo58 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

John Keats: Poetry, Life and Landscapes by Suzie Grogan is a fun and very well structured book. Keats is presented as poet, human, and very much a person of his time.While this covers his life and works it also brings together research that is scattered in various biographies and critical books into this readily accessible volume. If one simply wants to know and understand Keats in order to more fully appreciate his poetry, this will likely serve you better than the comprehensive but often dryly academic tomes.I recently read a book, Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse by Anahid Nersessian, that focused on his odes but in doing so also covered his relation to place and the events going on around him. Like Grogan, Nersessian is a lifelong Keats fan and it shows. These books complemented each other very well, one his life writ large the other his life filtered through his odes. And both include the personal attachment of the authors to their subject.Interestingly, I am also reading a book titled Writing America by Shelley Fisher Fishkin that connects place with literary figures, though in that case strictly in the US. Like Grogan, Fishkin shows us that locations are more than just places when it comes to influencing writers.I highly recommend this volume to anyone even remotely interested in Keats and his poetry. The writing is clear and the connection between the public and the private makes this the kind of read where the reader will likely relate to how deeply a writer's work can touch our own lives.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

[nancyadair-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I will never get to England. I had dreamed of it when I was in my twenties and thirties. I wanted to see the places that inspired the literature I loved. Now, I am content to remain an armchair traveler. Suzie Grogan's biography John Keats is a real treat, a wonderful way to meet John Keats and learn about his life and work and travels. Grogan discovered Keats as a teenager, memorizing his poetry and studying his life. She makes readers love Keats, too.I will admit that I had a limited knowledge of the Romantic writers, a deficit I have tried to make up for in my mature years. I had come across Keats while reading about other Romantic era writers. It was time to become more familiar with his poet. Keats studied to be a doctor but decided to dedicate his life to poetry. As a teenager, Keats had nursed his mother who was dying from TB. And he had taken care of his brother who also died of TB. As a physician, he knew he had tuberculosis, and it drove him to give up the woman he loved. Keats himself tragically died of TB at age 25.Severn's portrait of Keats dying of TBBefore his death, he managed a strenuous walking tour, although troubled by a sore throat. Grogan follows Keats' walking journey across north England and Scotland, describing what Keats would have seen and the modern view of the same scenes. The tour helped to inspire some of his best poetry. Illustrations enrich the book: Keat's beautiful, refined face, the houses and cottages where he lived or visited, the cathedrals and the streets he knew, statues and art portraying him.Grogan includes the iconic poems she discusses in the volume, and reading them was an important part of my appreciation.I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.