Reading Colvin's Keats. . . .

I have just read Sidney Colvin’s biography of John Keats and it was a highly interesting book with much to recommend it. Colvin himself was an interesting character that is remembered in part because of his close friendship with Robert Louis Stevenson. (He was also a close friend of E.V. Lucas who is one of my favorite writers). I have had this book for a number of years but never got around to reading it, and I am glad that I finally did because, as sad as the Keats story is, it is worth returning to often because it reminds us of how cruel the world can be to even the most talented among us (in fact, I should say particularly to the most talented among us).

I find it interesting to read older biographies of 19^th century writers, in part because I love the aura of old books, but also because the writers of such books were often close enough to their subjects in time that they were able to speak to people who actually personally knew the authors about which they were writing. Thus, even though Colvin’s book was originally published in 1887, he was able to talk to at least two people who had personal recall of John Keats who had died more than sixty years previous. Of course, there is a down side to the older biographies and that is that most of these books were written by people who were educated and lived squarely in the upper-class (or at least upper-middle-class) of the establishment. The works of many of the 19^th century writers were replete with radical aesthetic and political ideas but men like Colvin would have a great deal of trouble coming to grips with these notions. This is particularly true when we consider the question of Percy Shelley whose radical politics are now widely known. I recently read a remarkable book entitled William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s by Saree Makdisi. This is a pretty new book and it demonstrates the depth of insight that can be brought to bare on the politics of the Romantic poets by a brilliant and sophisticated contemporary thinker.

On the other hand, though I would consider myself a political radical, I am also a Romantic in spirit and thought and I don’t mind a thorough infusion of Romantic ideology in my stories about the great poets and artists of the 19^th century.

And, of course, Keats is certainly a fitting subject for Romantic ideology because, whatever it really means to be a representative of “Romanticism” (if that, indeed, means anything), at the very least the life of John Keats seems to fit all or our common stereotypes of such a notion. If nothing else, Keats is interesting because he seems to express a touching multitude of personal traits which make him, if not strictly a “Romantic,” thoroughly human in the very best sense. Above all, I would say that few individuals have possessed such a passion for knowledge as Keats. But, of course, Keats’ search was not the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Rather, like Montaigne’s great experiment, Keats was engaged in an exploration of the human soul. “Then to my human heart I turn at once . .” Keats wrote in his Sonnet Why Did I laugh Tonight, and to his heart he continually turned, as though it would reveal those secrets which our reason must, by its very nature, leave untouched. In other words, Keats was, like so many great poets, a genuine metaphysician; an explorer of the truths of the human heart at its best and at its worst. Melancholy, indolence, passion, joy, love; all these are landmarks on the map of the heart and Keats was an explorer on this landscape.

The most aggravating, and arguably the most interesting, from the historical perspective, part of the Keats story is the rather despicable way he was treated by the critics of his time. The most famous attacks on the young poet came from the Scottish Tory journal Blackwood’s Magazine. William Blackwood had hired two combative young writers, John Wilson and John Lockhart, to undertake most of his gutter journalism and to that end they printed blistering and usually personal attacks on political and cultural figures of their time. Their attacks on Keats were based largely on his membership in the so-called “Cockney” school of poetry associated with the leadership of Leigh Hunt. The nature of these criticisms were based, so the Blackwood’s writers claimed, on the use of ‘common’ and overly familiar language among the ‘Cockney’ poets. The idea was that poets like Hunt, Keats, and others, degraded poetry by failing to engage in properly noble diction and phraseology. However, for what was supposed to be an aesthetic criticism, the attacks from Blackwood’s were usually rabidly personal. Blackwood’s attacks on Keats’ Endymion volume of poetry have become legendary for base and disgusting language. But even when Blackwood’s addressed Keats’ last (Lamia) volume of poetry, when they had significantly softened their view, the nature of the critiques was still shockingly personal. “We should just as soon think of being wroth with vermin,” Blackwood’s wrote, “as we should of having any feeling at all about any of these [the ‘Cockney’ poets] people.” This was pretty heavy derision, particularly considering that Keats’ skill as a poet should have been fairly clear to anyone.

Of course the truth is that what the writers from the Tory Journal Blackwood’s really objected to was not Keats’ familiar language or base, everyday sentiments, but the very idea of working-class or politically radical individuals who had no pretentions to gentility having the gall to pursuing a poetic career in the first place. To borrow a concept from George Orwell, the objections to Keats’ poetry were really political ones which were then given an aesthetic disguise. We should recall that by the time Keats’ Lamia volume was published, Blackwood’s had already largely accepted the elevated stature of Wordsworth, whose entire poetic project had been based upon the use of everyday language to express poetic ideas. Furthermore, William Cowper, who was widely revered, had published some his very best work thirty years previously and one of the great charms of Cowper’s work is its remarkable familiarity of language. (Let’s not forget that Cowper’s greatest work The Task had been inspired by something as prosaic as a sofa). Another irony of the various attacks that Keats was forced to suffer was that, in aesthetic terms, he was arguably the most conservative poet of his era. Regardless of any beauty to be found in Keats’ poetry, he was, compared with his famous peers like Byron and Shelley, formal and old-fashioned in his approach, as his use of the so-called ‘heroic-couplet’ and Spenserian stanzas demonstrates. In fact in formal terms Keats is arguably closer to Thomas Campbell, or even Samuel Rogers who is now little know but was a sort of poetic grandfather of the Romantic era, than he was to many of his peers.

Of course, discussion of the subtleties of Keats’ diction compared with other 19^th century poets has become an increasingly difficult project for modern readers. In the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries many people were deeply steeped in poetic language and they were as familiar with many passages of poetry as we today might be with, say, dialogue from a popular situation-comedy or block-buster movie. If, therefore, we read discussions in a 19^th century book such as Colvin’s about what stands out in Keats’ poetry they can seem overly particular and even unrealistic because the language used by various poets is already unfamiliar to us. For example, Colvin tells us that “Keats in Endymion [his most famous and ambitious poem] has not reached nor come near reaching . . . mastery” over effective rhyming. And to bolster this claim Colvin quotes form the opening of the Third Book of "Endymion."

There are who lord it o’re their fellow men

With most prevailing tinsel; who unpen

Their baaing vanities, to browse away

The comfortable green and juicy hay

From human pastures; or, O torturing fact!

Who, through an idiot blink, will see unpack’d

Fire-branded foxes to sear up and singe

Our gold and ripe-ear’d hopes. With not one tinge

Of sanctuary splendour, not a sight

Able to face an owl’s, they still are dight

By the blear-ey’d nations in empurled vests,

And crowns and turbans.

Now, with all due respect to Sidney Colvin, this passage strikes me as artful and certainly not out of place with other poets who, during the era, garnered a great deal of respect. Granted, a number of the words (such as ‘unpen’ and ‘dight’ are a little out of the ordinary) but it is still and expertly executed passage. Compare it with, for example, a passage from Alexander Pope’s Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady. Now remember, during Keats’ time Pope’s memory was held in something like a divine status by many.

What beck’ning ghost, along the moon-light shade

Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?

‘Tis she! – but why that bleeding bosom gor’d,

Why dimly gleams the visionary sword?

Oh ever beauteous, ever friendly! Tell,

Is it, in heav’n, a crime to love too well.

To bear too tender, or too firm a heart,

To act a lover’s or a Roman’s part?

Now, I think for most readers today the Keats passage would seem not only more interesting but considerably more skillful given its obvious complexity. By comparison, the Pope passage seems trite and even simplistic. Of course, this is only one possible comparison among countless ones that one could choose, and perhaps it is an unfair one to make. However, as someone who has read a great deal of 18^th and 19^th century poetry, I find the critiques of Keats by his contemporaries (and even those by Colvin) difficult to fathom. To be honest, I cannot say for certain that my confusion is not, at least in part, a result of living in a very different era with very different standards of wording and diction. However, I suspect that I have read enough to fairly believe that the expertise and art of poets like Shelley and Keats was simply overlooked by many of their contemporaries because of class and political issues.

But if there is any doubt that even a very sympathetic critic like Sidney Colvin was still, in part, infected by the same kind of class virus that ran through the veins of the writers at Blackwood’s Magazine, let’s look at one of the more painful moments of his criticism of the poet. About half way through his lengthy book on Keats, a book that is as close to a panegyric as such a text can be and still hold the reader’s interest, Colvin criticizes Keats’ great poem Endymion this way –

“Other faults that more gravely mar the poem are not technical but spiritual: intimate failures of taste and feeling due partly to mere rawness and inexperience, partly to excessive intensity and susceptibility of temperament, partly to second-rateness [sic] of social training and association.” It is difficult not to interpret these words of Colvin’s as implying that Keats’ poem is marred by the fact that he was not sufficiently imbued with middle or upper-class values and connections. What else could “second-rateness of social training and association mean” in this context?

So it goes. Both Keats and Colvin lived in a particularly class-ridden society and though we are not subject to the same degree of pressure and judgment as they were, ours is far from a classless society.  And I don’t think it is a controversial claim to say that if one looked at a wide selection of contemporary art and literary criticism one would find a small but notable fraction of criticisms that are little more than thinly veiled class-based critiques.

Anyway, despite the drawbacks in the book, Colvin’s Keats is an interesting and worthwhile read. What it does best is remind the reader that as a person Keats, like so many artists that one comes to admire, was a broad expression of all that it means to be human. He was both strong and weak, a pugilist and a lover of beauty, and a seeker of knowledge about the human condition.