JOHN KEATS by Walter Jackson Bate. 732 pages. Harvard University Press.
$10. JOHN KEATS by Aileen Ward. 450 pages. Viking. $7.50. Romantic poets, the legend went, all died young and full of melancholy.
Eloquent escape artists in flight from reality, they contrived, if
possible, to be afflicted alike with consumption and unrequited
love—both, it was firmly understood, great heighteners of poetic
sensibility. Then, like dying nightingales singing their hearts out
while impaled upon the thorn of the everyday world, they poured forth
their pain in richly draped iambics. This precious caricature was never really accurate. But it was never
more misleading than when applied to John Keats, the one Romantic poet
whose outward life it seemed most to resemble. Keats's life was a
series of buffetings by a fate cruel enough to suit the most
sentimental of Victorian preconceptions. He lost his father at eight,
his mother at 14, his brother Tom at 23, and died himself of
tuberculosis at 25. His appointed guardian, Tea Merchant George Abbey,
hated him. Abbey apprenticed him to a doctor, tried to keep him from
seeing his younger sister Fanny, and cheated the orphaned Keats
children of most of the money they had been left by their innkeeper
father. Hungry Mind. But far from fading away under these tribulations, Keats
fought on ferociously. Though he was only 5 ft. tall, he was strong—he
once whipped a butcher boy twice his size because the boy had been
tormenting a kitten. Keats was, in fact, an extraordinarily
tough-minded fellow, full of energy and passion, who used poetry not as
an escape from life but as a way of laying hands on it. His story,
revealed not only in his poetry but in perceptive and engaging letters,
is a remarkable record of an extraordinarily hungry and ambitious mind
feeding on the world. “Why should we be owls, when we can be eagles?”
he wrote to his brother George who had emigrated in 1818 to America and
eventually became a prosperous Louisville mill owner. How well Keats succeeded is amply demonstrated by these two massive
biographies, the first to be published in nearly 25 years. They are
also the first to view Keats with neither the sentimentality of the
Victorians, who could not see the man clearly for the legend they had
themselves invented, nor the irritability of the succeeding Imagists,
who deprecated his poetry because of his “imprecise” romanticism. But
poetry is an art of masterpieces; a life's work of competent versifying
has not the staying power of a single poem that lodges in the race's
memory. Keats wrote four or five such poems, which possess that special
magic without which a poem is merely verse. Although current poetic
taste leans to the sinewy complexities of Donne and Eliot and Auden,
Keats probably draws and has drawn more young readers to poetry than
any other writer except Shakespeare.
