John Keats

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2:18A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. In 1819, John Keats wrote some of the most loved poems in English, among them Odes to a Nightingale and On Melancholy. Buied up by enthusiastic friends, he'd left his medical career for poetry roughly two years earlier, though some published reviews called him an uncouth cockney who should have stuck to medicine. Two years later, Keats was dead from TB, before his work found wider glory, and some who knew him, including Shelley, believed his true killer was the critics.

3:02With me to discuss John Keats are Fiona Stafford, Professor of English Language and Literature and Tutorial Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford. Mako O 'Halloran, Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature at the University of Newcastle. And Nicholas Rowe, Wardlaw Professor of English Literature at the University of St Andrews. Nick Rowe, can I start with you? Tell us something about Keats' family background and where that Cockney epithet may have come from. Yes, his family background was based in the City of London. He was born there in late October of 1795 at the Swan and Hoop livery stable, or near to there, on the City Road at Moorfields.

3:48This was a busy livery stable. His parents were Thomas Keats and Francis Jennings. Thomas was a helper in the livery stable. Francis Jennings was the daughter of the leaseholder of the stable and his wife, John Jennings and Alice Wally. And John Jennings was a wealthy man. He was also the master of the Innholders Guild. Besides John, Thomas and Francis had four other children. There was George, the second son, then Thomas and then Edward, who didn't last very long. And their daughter, Francis, was born in 1803. That's a momentous year because John and George went off to school to the north of London at Clark's Academy at Enfield.

4:361803 is also significant because it was the year before their father, Thomas, died in a tragic riding accident. It left Francis Jennings without a husband and the Keats children without a father. Presumably the financial stability came from the fact that Keats's mother was the daughter of a relatively wealthy leaseholder. That's exactly right. But there were problems, and Thomas's death initiated the break-up of the family and a long-running struggle between Frances Jennings, her parents, and her brother, who was called Midgley John Jennings. John Jennings left the majority of his fortune, which was over£12 ,000, a very substantial sum at the time, to his wife Alice, He left a very considerable sum to his son, Midgley John, but he left only an annuity of£50 per year to his daughter, Frances Jennings.

5:35So there was going to be financial instability, a recurring theme during Keats's life. Fiona Stafford, where did Keats go to school? It wasn't Eaton or Harrow, was it? But they were clearly able to afford a decent education. Yes, he was at the Enfield Academy, which was run by a man called John Clark, who was a liberal and inspiring teacher, I think. And so Keats, by our standards, had a good education. He's often caricatured as being uneducated because, as you say, he didn't go to Eton like Shelley. He didn't go to Harrow like Byron. But he did have a good education. And it was also an education which wasn't just bookish.

6:17he was also encouraged to look up at the stars and look at the natural world have a curiosity about the world around him but he was also, I mean he was taught Latin so when he was at school he translated the whole of Virgil's Aeneid which is quite a feat, I think we can be quite impressed by that so this idea of him somehow being working class and not educated is just really far from the truth He goes on to study medicine but he gives up his medical career in 1816. Why does he do that? Well, he gives it up, I think, because he realises what a good poet he is and he's meeting other poets and he's just incredibly excited by the whole idea of poetry.

7:00I mean, he's a very passionate reader of poetry. I can't think of anyone in the canon who is so excited about reading. So Keats is a real lover of poetry and he has a real gift for it. But, I mean, he did work hard as a medic as well. I think that's another thing that people often don't realise. He passed his medical exams, a lot was involved with that. So he could have practised as an apothecary or a surgeon, but instead he decides he's going to be a poet. And what does he take from those medical studies into his poetry? Well, I think quite a lot, especially his, well, for example, his pharmaceutical training, which would have been part of his qualification to be an apothecary the Apothecaries Act had just passed in 1815 so it was a moment where medicine was really tightening up and people were having to be more accountable and part of the training was to take walks on Hampstead Heath and go and look at the flowers which seems a bit odd to us until we remember that at this time they had no penicillin so most of the remedies that were being kind of prescribed by the apothecaries were basically dried flowers So you really had to know your flowers.

8:11There were some awful cases where people, you know, children had been given colts for or they were supposed to be having colts for a bad cough. And actually they were given dried foxglove leaves, which kill them. So, you know, there are some really important aspects of his medical training, which you then see in his poetry because he's so very specific about plants. So that would be one example of what he took from his medical training. And you find it informing his poetry. He's very good on poisonous plants. So in this early stage, Mako, can you tell us who was supporting, encouraging Keats in developing his poetry?

8:50Primarily his friends and his brothers. And I would really want to emphasise his fraternal ties with Tom and George, his two younger brothers, who provide a profound emotional and psychological comfort to Keats. They had been buffeted about, they'd had a lot of experience of bereavement in their childhood. Because his mother has died as well. That's right, yes. Relatively early on. Yes, his mother dies when Keats is about 14 and the Keats children then going to live with their grandmother. And Keats and his brothers rent a lot of lodgings all around London. And the 1817 collection of poems, Keats's first published collection, gives us some helpful insights into who else has been supporting Keats up to that point.

9:43And they include Charles Cowden Clark, to whom Keats addresses an important verse epistle. And Cowden Clark was the son of the headmaster, John Clark, and had encouraged Keats and had introduced him to all sorts of works of literature. So in that poem, Keats celebrates the epic poetry that he's been reading with Clark, Milton, Spencer, Tasso. He also recognises Clarke's influence in introducing him to the ode, the sonnet, the epic, and all these works that he feels have enriched his life. And then more strategically, Keats is also positioning himself in that volume of 1817, his first collection of poems with Lee Hunt, who was a recent supporter of Keats and had published one of his early poems on first looking into Chapman's Homer and really brought Keats into public attention by introducing him as one of three brilliant young poets from whom great things would be expected.

10:52And the other two happened to be Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Hamilton Reynolds who becomes a close friend of Keats too. Lee Hunt was something of a radical. Did that affect Keats's politics, his understanding of London society, British society at the time? Yes, absolutely. So Lee Hunt was the hero of liberty in lots of ways. He had gone to prison for libeling the Prince Regent in his weekly paper, which he ran with his brother, the Examiner. And Keats had grown up reading that in his boyhood at Clark's Academy. And Hunt is a kind of hero to Keats in that early stage and represents a radical thinking and independence of thought.

11:41So one of the poems that Keats, I mean, he actually dedicates the volume of 1817 to Hunt. He also writes a poem celebrating the day on which Lee Hunt was released from prison. and one of the things Keats admires is that Lee Hunt, despite being imprisoned, had not been constrained in his imagination. He still managed to fly with Milton through the fields of air and that independence of thought and liberty are so important to Keats. Nick Rowe, can you tell us a little bit about his tour of Scotland, a four-month tour of Scotland? Yes, he made a tour of Scotland in the summer of 1818 with his friend Charles Armitage Brown, who he'd met in the summer of the previous year.

12:28In the spring of 1818, Keats had been looking after his brother Tom in Tynmouth, down in Devonshire. Tom was ill with pulmonary tuberculosis, and it seems that over this spring, Keats started to have the idea of making a tour of the north with some thought of gathering imagery, scenery, towards an epic poem that he was contemplating. The poem eventually became Hyperion. And by coincidence, his brother George, who had recently married a girl called Georgiana Wiley, was planning to emigrate to America. They were able to combine their trips to the north, George and Georgiana, to Liverpool, where they were going to take their boat across the Atlantic.

13:13And then John and Charles Brown were going to continue up through the Lake District, where they failed to meet Wordsworth and didn't climb Helvellyn and made it halfway up Skiddor. But he was very taken with everything he saw, the landscape. He was extremely taken by, for example, Stockgill Force above Ambleside. He thought improved his ideas of the sublime and they then went on through the Burns country, a quick dip over to Northern Ireland and back, on up to Burns' birthplace at Alloway and then out to the Western Isles to Mull, to Iona, to Staffa, where they went into Fingal's Cave, up north towards the Great Glen where they climbed Ben Nevis and then on up to Inverness where, on a doctor's advice, Keats opted to take a coastal ship, a smack, back to London and it was a tour that was productive in poetic terms.

14:11Do you have any of that? The satirical piece, which is upon my life, Sir Nevis, I am piqued, which is a kind of satirical dialogue between Ben Nevis and a Mrs C. Sweet Nevis, do not quake, for though I love your honest countenance, all things above, truly I should not like to be conveyed so far into your bosom. But the sonnet that he wrote, read me a lesson, muse, and speak it loud upon the top of Nevis, blind in mist. I look into the chasms and the shroud vaporous doth hide them. Just so much I wist mankind do know of hell. I look ahead and there is sullen mist, even so much mankind can tell of heaven.

15:00Fiona, so he's having this surge of creativity around the tour to Scotland, but comes home a little prematurely to find his brother Tom dying of TB. What impact does that have? Absolutely huge impact. As Mako was saying, he was very close to his younger brothers. I think having lost their parents, John felt a particular responsibility for them and also as a trained doctor. He gets back to Hampstead. He finds Tom really in the final stages of tuberculosis consumption, as they would have called it. And he nurses him. And it is an absolutely harrowing part of his life. But out of that comes an extraordinary surge of creativity.

15:50It's very, very strange. And, you know, lots of people think of different reasons for why this could have occurred. And we don't really know. But the following spring, I mean, this is the December 1818. Tom dies on the 1st of December. And already by within a few months, Keats is pouring out the poems that he's best known for. So we have the Eve of St Agonis. Then we have this extraordinary sequence of odes, the ode to a nightingale, the ode on a Grecian urn, the ode on melancholy, la belle d 'un sans merci, plus some stunning sonnets as well. And they're just all pouring out of him. So it is a very extraordinary sequence of being absolutely at his lowest in a way.

16:38And then out of that comes this creativity. I think it's to do with the intensity of the feelings. He has all that energy and all those new experiences that he has in Scotland and in the North. He'd never seen mountains before. So he's got suddenly, he's seen the sublime firsthand. And then there he is, kind of cooped up in this sick room in Hampstead. And it's all dark and it's terribly unhealthy. It's probably where he contracted the disease that was going to kill him very soon afterwards. But some of this seems to just kind of come together in this great explosion. And this is where he met Fanny Braun.

17:20So can you give us a couple of lines from one of your favourite sonnets or odes from that great year of creativity? Yes, I would have to choose the Ode to a Nightingale. And I think the way the poem finishes is so very Keatsian because it doesn't end with a conclusion. It ends with a question and we don't quite know what to make of it. And it just ends, was it a vision or a waking dream? Fled is that music? Do I wake or sleep? Mako, you wanted to come in there. I think I would have to choose some lines from the end of Ode to Psyche. Yes, I will be thy priest and build a fane in some untrodden region of my mind where branched thoughts new grown with pleasant pain instead of pines shall murmur in the wind.

18:13Thank you. And I really liked Ode to Psyche as well. I thought it was a super poem, really did. It's also really extraordinary the formal spectrum from incredibly complex forms to actually quite simple forms and also in terms of the subject matter as well. And he was trying different things, wasn't he? There's a month, January 1818, where you look at what he was writing and the change of mood. He's writing a poem to Mrs Reynolds' cat and then he's writing a sonnet on Sitting Down to Read King Lear again. I mean, the shift in register and form is extraordinary. Yeah, yeah. He starts out with Spencerian stanzas, a very difficult form to master.

19:00He writes an imitation of Spencer, comes back to the form in The Eve of St Agnes, writing a narrative romance in about 40 stanzas, apparently in a very few days. It's an astonishing achievement. That's an incredible thing as well. is he doesn't seem to have spent days and months bent over 14 lines. You know, they seem to come out in a couple of days. Yeah, or less than that. I mean, Oto Nightingale's supposed to be, just sort of sits down and writes in about three hours. I don't know if that's true. I think that's significant in the sense that he seems to write at his best in a single effort, a single creative outpouring, for want of a better word.

19:41But when, for example, with his epic project in Hyperion, He was attempting to write that in the autumn of 1818 and being interrupted, understandably, by his poor brother Tom, who was dying. He found it very difficult to pick up the creative momentum again and bring the poem to completion, which arguably is one reason, as well as his sense that he was too close to Milton's manor in Paradise Lost. I think it was something much closer as well to his patterns of composition and how he wrote at his best. in one sustained push of creativity. There's quite an emphasis on mortality in some of the poems.

20:24Is he already considering his own mortality? Well, he was considering it even a year before that. He writes his sonnet, When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be Before My Pen Has Gleaned My Teeming Brain, a year before that. And I think if you were a medical student at that time, you saw mortality on a daily basis, as well as his early experiences. He lost one of his little brothers when he was only nine and he lost his father, as Nick was describing, and his mother. Keats is not under any illusion that death's not there and that it's coming for you. And I think that adds to the intensity. I think it adds to that sort of need to pour it out.

21:07I mean, I think that sonnet, which was written before he was ill and before Tom died... Which one was then? When I have fears that I may cease to be, you get this real sense that unless you really keep writing, you're not going to get everything that's in your mind onto paper and into forms that are going to benefit humanity long after you've gone. So I think death's really important to him. Thank you. The best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong people. So when you want to reach the right professionals, use LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn has grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals, including 130 million decision makers.

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24:44Ameko, one of the forms that Keats was fascinated by was epic poetry. Why was that? That's right. Keats had inherited a model of poetic progress from Virgil via Spencer and Milton, in which poets would begin their apprenticeship work in the pastoral genre. So they would write poems about leisure, pleasure, sensuous delight in pastoral settings. And then they would work their way up to the ambitious genre of the epic. and that's what you would do when you were a mature poet and at the height of your powers. So that's when Milton composes his Paradise Lost or Dante, his Divine Comedy. Keats was attempting epic poetry at the age of 22 and I think it is because exactly as Fiona says, he feels this compression of time and having lost Tom at such a young age he's more aware than ever that he may have a limited amount of time in which to compose his epic poetry.

25:56So he does leap from, well, his last published work was Endymion, a pastoral romance, into Hyperion, which is an extraordinary attempt at epic. he makes two attempts at epic poetry at either they actually kind of bookend what we now think of as his living year the year in which he writes all the poems that he's most famous for and the 20th century critic Robert Gittings actually dates it very precisely to the 21st of September 1818 to the 21st of September 1819 an extraordinary outpouring of poems and the first they begin and end with two epic fragments. So Keats intended these works to be longer.

26:46And in the first Hyperion fragment, he slows down and he uses blank verse. He had been using rhyming couplets before, hence what a lot of the critics say is the Cockney rhymes. You know, that's one of the associations with Keats's previous poetry. But he uses blank verse, which is unrhymed iambic pentameter, the verse form that Milton uses in Paradise Lost. It's what Wordsworth uses in the Prelude. And he really examines suffering. He is working his way towards writing about Apollo, the Olympian successor to Hyperion, who becomes the god of the sun and of healing and of poetry. So the poet healer that Keats admires and taking forward that medical sort of identity.

27:40Almost as though he identified with Apollo himself. Yes, he actually really does revere Apollo and writes a lot of poems about Apollo in the lead up to this. So he wants to explore the ascension of Apollo. But what he finds is that he's so imaginatively immersed in the desolate and bewildered condition of the fallen titans, the predecessors to the Olympian gods, that he spends most of the fragment elucidating their sorrow. Fiona, I was struck in advance of this programme, I read quite a lot of his poetry, I was struck how some of them are very, very romantic, with a small R. There was a particular poem, To a Lady Seen for a Few Moments in Vauxhall, a wonderfully prosaic title, about how he saw somebody five years ago, fell in love with her, only saw her for five minutes, but constantly thinks of her ever since then.

28:42and some of the other poems are extremely intense in his affection, yet we don't hear that much about his personal life. What was his personal life like, his love life? Well, there's still quite a bit of mystery about some aspects of it. There's a woman called Isabella Jones, for example, who he met and may be the inspiration for his poem Isabella, but it may just be that he liked reading Boccaccio. So it's really quite difficult to tell. He was susceptible to women, but I mean, he lets things slip in his letters. He says he sometimes has, you know, bad thoughts about women. So there is quite a mystery.

29:24But we do know that he fell in love with Fanny Braun in Hampstead. And this was the young woman. She was quite a lot younger than him. She was only 18. They became engaged towards the end of that. Annus Mirabilis. and there are people who think that it was because he fell in love with Fanny Braun that he wrote all those wonderful odes. Again, there's lots of discussion about it, but we don't have much evidence. And the woman you're referring to, who he saw in Vauxhall Gardens, we don't know who she is. You know, it's one of those great, great mysteries. But, I mean, he did say early on that actually he was so attached to his brothers that he has a stronger feeling for them than he could ever have for a woman.

30:07And so that sort of family feeling is really, really deep. But then I think one of the difficulties is that Keats wrote lots of letters. He had lots of friends who we were hearing about. And he sort of dashes things off often when he's had a drink or whatever. And then scholars of a later year pour over all of these letters and construct things from them. I mean, because we just don't always have the evidence. They are a useful resource, those letters, aren't they? because he was pretty good at keeping letters and he wrote a lot of letters. He wrote a lot of letters and other people kept them as well and they are absolutely wonderful letters.

30:44I mean, I think people who only know his poetry actually really miss out. I think he's just a brilliant letter writer and you really get a sense of his personality and his friendships because he has a slightly different tone depending on whether he's writing to his brothers or whether he's writing to John Hamilton Reynolds. And it's where a lot of our ideas about what he thought about poetry come from because a lot of the letters are talking about poetry to fellow poets and this is where he coins the term negative capability or when he's talking about axioms in philosophy and not axioms until you feel them on the pulses lots of those things that we think of as quintessentially Keats and then we read into the poems are coming from his private correspondence so it's a wonderful a wonderful resource.