Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats

by John Keats, Edward Hirsch (Introduction)

Overview

'I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death,' John Keats soberly prophesied in 1818 as he started writing the blankverse epic Hyperion. Today he endures as the archetypal Romantic genius who explored the limits of the imagination and celebrated the pleasures of the senses but suffered a tragic early death. Edmund Wilson counted him as 'one of the half dozen greatest English writers,' and T. S. Eliot has paid tribute to the Shakespearean quality of Keats's greatness. Indeed, his work has survived better than that of any of his contemporaries the devaluation of Romantic poetry that began early in this century. This Modern Library edition contains all of Keats's magnificent verse: 'Lamia,' 'Isabella,' and 'The Eve of St. Agnes'; his sonnets and odes; the allegorical romance Endymion; and the five-act poetic tragedy Otho the Great. Presented as well are the famous posthumous and fugitive poems, including the fragmentary 'The Eve of Saint Mark' and the great 'La Belle Dame sans Merci,' perhaps the most distinguished literary ballad in the language. 'No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perception of loveliness,' said Matthew Arnold. 'In the faculty of naturalistic interpretation, in what we call natural magic, he ranks with Shakespeare.'

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307419354
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/22/2009
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	640
Sales rank:	806,309
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

John Keats was born in October 1795, son of the manager of a livery stable in Moorfields. His father died in 1804 and his mother, of tuberculosis, in 1810. By then he had received a good education at John Clarke’s Enfield private school. In 1811 he was apprenticed to a surgeon, completing his professional training at Guy’s Hospital in 1816. His decision to commit himself to poetry rather than a medical career was a courageous one, based more on a challenge to himself than any actual achievement. His genius was recognized and encouraged by Charles Cowden Clarke and J. H. Reynolds, and in October 1816 he met Leigh Hunt, whose Examiner had already published Keats’s first poem. Only seven months later Poems (1817) appeared. Despite the high hopes of the Hunt circle, it was a failure. By the time Endymion was published in 1818 Keats’s name had been identified with Hunt’s "Cockney School," and the Tory Blackwood’s Magazine delivered a violent attack on Keats as a lower-class vulgarian, with no right to aspire to "poetry."But for Keats fame lay not in contemporary literary politics but with posterity. Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth were his inspiration and challenge. The extraordinary speed with which Keats matured is evident from his letters. In 1818 he had worked on the powerful epic fragment Hyperion, and in 1819 he wrote The Eve of St Agnes, La Belle Dame sans Merci, The Major Odes, Lamia, and the deeply exploratory Fall of Hyperion. Keats was already unwell when preparing the 1820 volume for the press; by the time it appeared in July he was desperately ill. He died in Rome in 1821. Keats’s final volume did receive some contemporary critical recognition, but it was not until the latter part of the nineteenth century that his place in English Romanticism began to be recognized, and not until this century that it became fully recognized.

Edward Hirsch is an American poet and critic. He has published nine books of poetry and six books of prose. Among his poetry collections are the titles For the Sleepwalkers, Earthly Measures, On Love, and Special Orders. Hirsch is the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York City. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION
 
Edward Hirsch
 
John Keats’s poems and letters were for me—as they have been for so many others over the past two centuries—the portals of poetry itself, the highly decorated doors through which one passed into a magisterial kingdom, a realm of pure feeling, passionate thought. “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination,” Keats wrote to Benjamin Bailey in November 1817. “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth.” This is the sort of certainty that announces a vocation—it helped to seal mine—and opens the pathway to a life’s work. “The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream,” Keats continued, “he awoke and found it truth.” So many of Keats’s formulations are like a bell, a trumpet call, leading us to our deepest, most imaginative selves.
 
Keats believed that “the excellence of every Art is its intensity.” One discovers in the luxuriant lyric spaces of his art that the emotions are deemed sacred and the daydreaming capacities of the mind are given free rein to join with a feverishly active consciousness, with what he calls in “Ode to Psyche” “a working brain.” He left ample room in his poems for reverie and trance, for waking into a “slumberous tenderness” (“The Eve of St. Agnes”), and he combined that associative drift with a startling openheartedness and a ferocious working intellect, the mind of a maker. He believed in the essential healthiness of the lyric—the healing powers of art—and early on borrowed a metaphor from medicine to declare that poetry itself “should be a friend/To soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man” (“Sleep and Poetry”).
 
Keats was a keen, indelible phrase maker—“I look upon fine Phrases like a Lover,” he wrote—and his work has great verbal sumptuousness. Many of his phrases and lines seem almost to have been formulated by the English language itself, as if he had become its vehicle, a transparent vessel, like Shakespeare, who was his supreme source.
 
The poetry of earth is never dead.
   (“On the Grasshopper and Cricket”)
When I have fears that I may cease to be
   (“When I have fears …”)
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.
   (Endymion)
Tender is the night,
   (“Ode to a Nightingale”)
Where are the songs of Spring?
   (“To Autumn”)
 
When I was a boy my grandfather used to quote Keats’s lines to me, like proverbs or psalms. I had no idea where these phrases, these formulas and equations (such as the urn’s claim, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”) actually originated. I felt as if he had pulled them out of the summer air or summoned them from the collective pool of all the poetry he knew. Later, when I was in high school, I was surprised, and a little discomfited, to discover that so many of his lines had come from the teeming brain of a single nineteenth-century author. It was as if my grandfather had taken to heart Keats’s own formulation that “Poetry should … strike the Reader’s a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance….” Sometimes, reading Keats’s poems late at night, on my own, I still feel as if I am hearing not the beautifully formed cadences of a solitary writer, one of the major Romantic poets, but the Orphic voice of English poetry itself.
—
 
John Keats belongs to the second wave, second generation, of Romantic poets. He was the last born (1795), the most short-lived (twenty-five years old), the most easily endearing, obviously lovable, and the first to die (1821) of the key Romantic figures. Shelley, for example, was born three years before him and outlasted him by one year, long enough to write one of his best poems for him, the elegy “Adonais.” (“And Love taught Grief to fall like music from his tongue.”) Coleridge, who once shook hands with Keats on Hampstead Heath and declared “There is death in that hand,” outlived him by thirteen years. Wordsworth, who was twenty-five years Keats’s senior, survived him by nearly three decades.
 
Keats’s background was obscure. He came from a lower-middle-class milieu in an extremely class-bound society, and thereby entered poetry without the advantages of birth, wealth, or university education. An aura of class still sometimes hovers around his achievement and reputation. This comes not only from his early detractors, the nasty politically motivated Tory critics from Blackwood’s Magazine and the Quarterly Review who labeled him part of “the Cockney School of Poetry,” but also from some of his later admirers, such as W. B. Yeats who in the poem “Ego Dominus Tuus” characterized Keats as “poor, ailing, and ignorant,” and defined him as “the coarse-bred son of a livery-stable keeper” who made “luxuriant song” out of his frustrated disadvantages. Yeats’s snobbery was gratuitous since he was primarily using Keats to demonstrate his own theory of how every poet seeks his or her own opposite. But from the first there seem always to have been readers who could not abide Keats’s liberal sympathies and “Cockney” roots, his radical sensuality and democratic feeling for literary culture, his mask of—to use Yeats’s fine phrase—“deliberate happiness.”
 
Keats was the eldest of five children and learned to greet death early. By the time he was fifteen he had lost an infant brother, two uncles, his kindly maternal grandfather, and both his parents, whose death left him, as he said, with “a personal soreness which the world had exacerbated.” To add to the misfortune, the orphaned children were then cheated out of their modest inheritance by an unscrupulous guardian. Keats nursed his mother through much of her final eighteen-month illness—she died, presumably from tuberculosis—just as he would later nurse his brother Tom, and the experience seems to have spilled over into the decision to apprentice himself to a surgeon-apothecary. He always was ambitious, as he said, “of doing the world some good.” In one of his last poems, “The Fall of Hyperion: a Vision,” written well after he had abandoned medicine for poetry, he describes the poet as “a sage;/A humanist, physician to all men.”
 
Keats offers us the very model of a self-directed artistic development as a life well lived. He was entirely self-actualized, self-actualizing. There would be no Harrow or Eton, no Oxford or Cambridge in his experience, though he was fortunate to attend Clarke School in Enfield (1803–1811), a small progressive, enlightened academy on the outskirts of London. There he became particular friends with the headmaster’s son, Charles Cowden Clarke, who was eight years his senior. Many years after Keats’s death, Clarke recalled how as a schoolboy Keats had been “highly pugnacious” with an “ungovernable” temper and a “terrier courage.” Clarke’s portrait stands as a corrective to the myth of “poor Keats,” the fatal victim of hostile reviews (Byron tartly claimed that Keats was “snuffed out by an article”) and replaces it with a more accurate portrait of a person who plunged into things, who was scrappy, volatile, and impetuous, both physically vital and mentally robust.
 
At Clarke Keats became a voracious reader with an insatiable appetite for poetry, for Latin authors and mythological keys to classical culture, such as Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, Tooke’s Pantheon, and Spence’s Polymetis. “I know nothing, I have read nothing and I mean to follow Solomon’s directions of ‘get Wisdom—get understanding.’” He vowed with iron resolve: “There is but one way for me—the road lies th[r]ough application study and thought. I will pursue it….” The unappeasable hunger for books, for ancient stories and myths, for beautiful works of art only increased after Keats left school at sixteen—it was lifelong, needful to him as food. Clarke recalled how ardently his young friend responded to Spenser’s “Epithalamion” and then went through the first volume of the Faerie Queene “as a young horse would through a spring meadow—ramping!” Spenser’s highly descriptive passages opened Keats up to his own wondrously florid isle, his own laurel groves, a shady Bower of Bliss.
 
Keats wrote his first known poem in 1814 (“Imitation of Spenser”) under the excited spell of a writer who instigated his own dreamy sensuousness, whose imagery fomented his enchantments. Many of his early poems exhibit his dissenting political spirit (“On Peace,” “Written on the Day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left Prison”), his sense of the grandeur of poetry (“Ode to Apollo”), and his feeling for the way nature inspires and instructs poets (“To one who has been long in city pent,” “I stood tip-toe upon a little hill”). I have always been moved by Keats’s tribute poem and verse epistle “To Charles Cowden Clarke,” which speaks to Clarke’s mentorship but also to their exalted experience of reading poetry together. “That you first taught me all the sweets of song,” Keats remembers in a series of richly balanced couplets:
 
The grand, the sweet, the terse, the free, the fine;
What swell’d with pathos, and what right divine:
Spenserian vowels that elope with ease,
And float along like birds o’er summer seas;
Miltonian storms, and more, Miltonian tenderness;
Michael in arms, and more, meek Eve’s fair slenderness.
 
Keats summarizes the wide range he hears in “the sweets of song,” the particular mellifluous sounds (“Spenserian vowels”) and enabling tones (“Miltonian storms and … tenderness”) he discovers in two keys poets who spurred and made possible his own practice. He also goes on to glory in the swelling capabilities—the immense possibilities—of the poetic forms themselves: the sonnet, the ode, the epigram, and the epic. One feels that Keats’s generous poem of acknowledgment, written in September 1816, signals the virtual completion of his poetic apprenticeship. A few weeks later he penned his first major poem, “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer,” which, as Leigh Hunt recognized, “completely announced the new poet taking possession.”
 
Keats wrote his breakthrough poem at a fever pitch in a couple of enthralling early morning hours. He always did love the intoxication of creating in a fine frenzy. This is an emblematic or allegorical moment in Keats’s writing life—in the life of any young poet—because his reading vitally seizes him and spurs him into his own extravagant making. It delivers him to himself. Keats and Clarke had spent the entire night excitedly poring over a borrowed 1616 folio edition of George Chapman’s translation of Homer, which contained both the Iliad and the Odyssey. They searched out the great passages, the heart-stopping scenes, comparing Pope’s well-tempered eighteenth-century couplets with Chapman’s more propulsive, free-striding Elizabethan verse. Keats finally tore himself away at six A.M. He departed “at day-spring,” as Clarke later recalled, “yet he contrived that I should receive the poem, from a distance of nearly two miles, before 10 A.M.” A fair copy of the poem was sitting on Clarke’s table when he came down to breakfast.

Table of Contents

	Biographical Note	v
	Introduction	xv
	Poems (1817)
	Dedication. To Leigh Hunt, Esq.	3
	'I stood tip-toe upon a little hill'	3
	Specimen of an Induction to a Poem	10
	Calidore: A Fragment	12
	To Some Ladies	17
	On receiving a curious Shell and a Copy of Verses from the Same Ladies	18
	To * * * *	20
	To Hope	22
	Imitation of Spenser	24
	'Woman! when I behold thee flippant, vain'	25
	Epistles	27
	To George Felton Mathew	27
	To my Brother George	30
	To Charles Cowden Clarke	34
	Sonnets	38
1	To my Brother George	38
2	To * * * * *	38
3	Written on the Day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left Prison	39
4	'How many bards gild the lapses of time!'	39
5	To a Friend who sent me some Roses	40
6	To G. A. W.	40
7	'O solitude! if I must with thee dwell'	41
8	To my Brothers	41
9	'Keen fitful gusts are whispering here and there'	42
10	'To one who has been long in city pent'	42
11	On first looking into Chapman's Homer	43
12	On leaving some Friends at an early Hour	43
13	Addressed to Haydon	44
14	Addressed to the Same	44
15	On the Grasshopper and Cricket	45
16	To Kosciusko	45
17	'Happy is England'	46
	Sleep and Poetry	47
	Endymion: A Poetic Romance	59
	Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems (1820)
	Lamia	187
	Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil	208
	The Eve of St. Agnes	224
	Ode to a Nightingale	236
	Ode on a Grecian Urn	238
	Ode to Psyche	240
	Fancy	242
	Ode	245
	Lines on the Mermaid Tavern	246
	Robin Hood	247
	To Autumn	249
	Ode on Melancholy	250
	Hyperion	251
	Posthumous and Fugitive Poems
	On Peace	279
	Lines written on 29 May, the Anniversary of Charles's Restoration, on hearing the Bells ringing	260
	Ode to Apollo	280
	'As from the darkening gloom a silver dove'	281
	To Lord Byron	282
	'Fill for me a brimming bowl'	282
	To Chatterton	283
	To Emma	283
	'Give me Women, Wine, and Snuff'	284
	On receiving a Laurel Crown from Leigh Hunt	285
	'Come hither all sweet maidens soberly'	285
	Written in Digust of Vulgar Superstition	286
	'O! how I love, on a fair summer's eve'	286
	To a Young Lady who sent me a Laurel Crown	287
	'After dark vapours have oppressed our plains'	287
	Lines in a Letter to J. H. Reynolds, from Oxford	288
	On the Sea	288
	To the Ladies who saw me Crowned	289
	Nebuchadnezzar's Dream	289
	'Haydon! forgive me that I cannot speak'	290
	Hymn to Apollo	290
	On seeing the Elgin Marbles	291
	On 'The Story of Rimini'	292
	Written on a Blank Space at the End of Chaucer's 'The Floure and the Leafe'	292
	'In drear nighted December'	293
	'Unfelt, unheard, unseen'	294
	Stanzas	294
	'Hither, hither, love--'	295
	'Think not of it, sweet one, so--'	296
	On sitting down to read 'King Lear' once again	297
	To a Cat	297
	'Hence Burgundy, Claret, and Port'	298
	Lines on seeing a Lock of Milton's Hair	299
	'When I have fears that I may cease to be'	301
	To the Nile	301
	To a Lady seen for a few Moments at Vauxhall	302
	'Spenser! a jealous honourer of thine'	302
	Answer to a Sonnet by J. H. Reynolds, ending--	303
	Apollo to the Graces	303
	'O blush not so!'	304
	'O thou whose face hath felt the Winter's wind'	305
	The Human Seasons	305
	'Where be ye going, you Devon maid?'	306
	'For there's Bishop's Teign'	306
	To Homer	308
	To J. H. Reynolds from Teignmouth 25 March 1818	309
	'Over the hill and over the dale'	312
	To J. R.	313
	Fragment of an Ode to Maia	313
	'Sweet, sweet is the greeting of eyes'	314
	Acrostic	314
	On visiting the Tomb of Burns	315
	A Song about Myself	315
	To Ailsa Rock	319
	Meg Merrilies	319
	'Ah! ken ye what I met the day'	320
	'All gentle folks who owe a grudge'	322
	'Of late two dainties were before me plac'd'	324
	Sonnet written in the Cottage where Burns was born	324
	Lines written in the Highlands after visiting the Burns Country	325
	Staffa	327
	'Read me a lesson, Muse, and speak it loud'	328
	Ben Nevis: a Dialogue	329
	Song	331
	To his Brother George in America	332
	'Where's the Poet?'	334
	Modern Love	334
	The Castle Builder: Fragments of a Dialogue	335
	'Welcome joy, and welcome sorrow'	337
	'Hush, hush! Tread softly! hush, hush, my dear!'	338
	The Dove	339
	Extracts from an Opera	339
	The Eve of Saint Mark	342
	To Sleep	346
	'Why did I laugh to-night?'	346
	On a Dream after reading of Paolo and Francesca in Dante's 'Inferno'	347
	'The House of Mourning written by Mr. Scott'	347
	'Fame, like a wayward girl'	348
	Song of Four Fairies	348
	La Belle Dame sans Mercy [Indicator version]	351
	La belle dame sans merci	353
	'How fever'd is the man, who cannot look'	355
	'If by dull rhymes our English must be chain'd'	355
	Faery Songs	356
	Spenserian Stanzas on Charles Armitage Brown	357
	Ode on Indolence	358
	A Party of Lovers	360
	'The day is gone'	361
	Lines to Fanny	361
	To Fanny	363
	To Fanny	365
	'This living hand, now warm and capable'	365
	'Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art'	365
	Two or three Posies	366
	'When they were come unto the Faery's Court'	367
	'In after-time a sage of mickle lore'	370
	Longer Posthumous Poems: Narrative and Dramatic
	The Fall of Hyperion: a Vision	373
	The Cap and Bells; or, The Jealousies	388
	Otho the Great	413
	King Stephen	479
	Selected Letters
	To Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817	489
	To George and Tom Keats, 21, 27 (?) December 1817	491
	To J. H. Reynolds, 3 February 1818	493
	To John Taylor, 27 February 1818	494
	To John Taylor, 24 April 1818	495
	To J. H. Reynolds, 3 May 1818	497
	To Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818	500
	To George and Georgiana Keats, 14 February to 3 May 1819	502
	To Fanny Brawne, 25 July 1819	507
	To Percy Bysshe Shelley, 16 August 1820	508
	To Charles Brown, 30 September 1820	510
	To Charles Brown, 30 November 1820	512
	Notes	515
	Index of Titles	565
	Index of First Lines	571
	Commentary	577
	Study Guide	597

Reading Group Guide

1. Compare the speakers of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode to a Nightingale." How would you describe each speaker's state of mind? In both poems, something exterior to the speaker serves as a catalyst for a vision. What is the vision that each speaker experiences? Are these visions compatible or competing? Discuss why it might be significant that "Ode on a Grecian Urn" ends with a statement while "Ode to a Nightingale" ends with a question.

2. Consider the role of the human senses in Keats's poems. Compare two or more poems that invoke the senses (such as "Ode to a Nightingale" or "The Eve of St. Agnes"). Why are the senses important? Do the poems value certain senses more than others? What is the relationship between the senses and poetic imagination/poetic insight that each of these poems offers?

3. Discuss the role of female figures in Keats's poems. Examine poems such as "The Eve of St. Agnes, " and "La Belle Dame sans Merci." How are female figures used in each?

4. Consider Keats's letters as a statement of poetics. Discuss, in particular, Keats's letter to Richard Woodhouse, in which he claims, "A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence, because he has no Identity." What does he mean by this? What does he imagine is the poet's function in society-interpreter? creator? visionary? What, according to Keats, motivates the poet to write? Discuss his claim that, "I feel assured I should write from the mere yearning and fondness I have for the Beautiful even if my night's labours should be burnt every morning and no eye ever shine uponthem."

5. Discuss Keats's definition of "Negative Capability" in his letter to George and Thomas Keats. What is Negative Capability, and who, according to Keats, possesses it? How might Negative Capability be related to his notion that the poet "has no identity"?

6. Keats's first collection of poems, published in 1817, received a barrage of negative criticism from Tory politicians. Examine John Wilson Croker's and John Gibson Lockhart's critiques of Keats's poems. What, specifically, do they find so offensive about Keats's language? What do they think is the appropriate language for poetry? In what ways does Keats's assertion that "with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration" threaten Croker's and Lockhart's assumptions about poetry?

Editorial Reviews

"No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness."

From the Publisher