Keats YouTube biography

John Keats - his life and achievements

A brief (9 minute) audio biography of John Keats

 with images of locations associated with the poet.

Why 'strangely encouraging'? Because Keats:

• overcame childhood traumas,
• put those traumas into his creative journey,
• abandoned a potentially lucrative career to be true to his vocation,
• turned himself into a world-class poet in a three-year period, arrived at his achievement through determination and false starts as well as instinctive genius, and
• created a body of work that would eventually secure his place as a poet as great as any of his time.
• More on Keats from Leigh Hunt's perspective in the video 'The First Fab Four'

DIP INTO TWO OF HIS GREATEST LYRICS HERE,

                           TO AUTUMN                                               ON THE SHORE

         'Among the river sallows, borne aloft'... Keats Walk,              'Then on the shore I stand alone and think

           Winchester, at the time of year To Autumn was composed        Till love and fame to nothingness do sink'

(How beautiful the season is now, a temperate sharpness in the air...

Somehow a stubble plain looks warm,

this struck me so much on my walk that I composed upon it....)

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom friend of the maturing sun
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd  cottage-trees,                               
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease
For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells.


Where are the songs of Spring ? Ay, where are they ?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

In the song’s spoken introduction (from a letter of 22/9/1819) Keats says that the poem was inspired by seeing the setting sun turning the stubble fields red. But this key image figures almost casually in the final verse – ‘and touch the stubble plains with rosy hue’.

Shortly before writing To Autumn he had written: ‘Autumn is encroaching – for the Autumn fog over a rich land is like the steam from cabbage water’. Could this down-to-earth image of the fog be the beginnings of the poem’s famous first line?

Scholars say that manuscript evidence indicates that verses 1 & 3 of the poem were written at the same sitting, and that verse 2 was added later. In it he compared the autumn to the various occupations of the Hampshire people he observed around him in Winchester.

Some say that the reference to the gleaner in verse 2 has a political resonance. Keats was probably aware of prosecutions that had taken place for gleaning after the passing of the 1815 corn laws (they had been denounced in the letters page of the Examiner, which he read regularly). 'By reinscribing the word ('gleaner') into poetry and into the poetic tradition, Keats was making (consciously or not) a claim for the legitimacy of the act of gleaning: he discovered another way of writing politics into poetry, one that, through its silence, exerted a political pressure of presupposition' (andrew j. bennett).

To Autumn was written shortly after the Peterloo massacre, when demonstrators in Manchester calling for the vote for all British men and women had been attacked by yeomanry and cavalrymen. 11 had been killed, 600 wounded. Keats had been in London recently and had witnessed a tumultuous demonstration there greeting the main speaker Henry Hunt and survivors from the event.

Could the tone of the poem, so full and calm, be a reaction to the political and financial chaos that Peterloo threatened to unleash ? It has been said that Britain at this time was closer to revolution than it had ever been since the Civil War – though memories of that civil conflict were fresher than they are now and very few will have wanted to repeat those days.

Underlying the poem is the theme of change, but change unfolding peacefully and naturally. Maybe this is Keats’s subliminal political message after Peterloo. He had written once ‘I hope to put something to the liberal side of the question before I die’.

Rock and pop stars often comment on current political matters. Very often there’s a directness of approach: perhaps Keats’s poem To Autumn shows another way of reflecting such issues ?

7. ON THE SHORE

Source: Untitled sonnet ‘When I have fears’

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain;
Before high-piled books in charactery
Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain
When I behold upon the sky’s night face
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance
And when I feel fair creature of an hour
That I may never look upon thee more
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love
Then on the shore I stand alone and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink

Keats’s sonnet ‘When I have fears’, titled here ‘On the Shore’, is on the theme of untimely death. Though his early death at the age of 25 gives the poem poignancy, it was written as a literary exercise, before Keats knew of his fatal infection with tuberculosis, perhaps in response to one of Shakespeare’s sonnets (no 64). The ‘fair creature of an hour’ is thought to refer to a girl glimpsed at the Vauxhall gardens in London.

The poem reveals Keats's sceptical attitude towards the idea of an afterlife. As a freethinker who refused the consolations of religion even on his deathbed, he could not be satisfied with such predictions, or any other conception of an afterlife. All he can say, confronted with the issue of death ‘before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain’, is that: ‘On the shore, I stand alone and think/Till love and fame to nothingness do sink’.

A longer read:

Even in the World War I trenches Keats's work lived on: 

Keats's 'To Autumn' and Wilfred  Owen's 'Spring Offensive'.

Every autumn weather forecasters in Britain quote the line

‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ from Keats’s great poem ‘To Autumn’.

This essay assesses its influence on a poem written in a battle zone in 1917.

• In 1917 one of Wilfred Owen’s junior officers, John Foulkes, who incidentally had no idea that Owen was a poet,

• quoted a piece of Keats’s work to him and noticed how his face ‘shone with wonder and delight’. Unknowingly, he had touched a sweet spot for Owen. The late scholar of Wilfred Owen’s life and work Dominic Hibberd called him ‘the last great heir to the Romantics’, and though he also noted that Owen thought Shelley a ‘greater genius’ than Keats, with a conception of the social role of the poet that would sustain him in the trenches, it was Keats rather than Shelley whose influence can be traced in what Hibberd described as Owen’s ‘last and best war poem’, ‘Spring Offensive’.

   Owen had absorbed Keats’s work in his late adolescence, and Hibberd’s assessment is that ‘Keats taught him how to use the sound of words and the shapes of poems’. My contention is that ‘Spring Offensive’ draws on the atmosphere and words of Keats’s ‘To Autumn’, to evoke a scene of beauty poised on the brink of hell. It was not that Owen had a copy of ‘To Autumn’ open in front of him as he wrote ‘Spring Offensive’, but the subconscious influence I would argue is clear.

   That very situation of ‘Spring Offensive’ recalls ‘To Autumn’, for the scene that Keats conjured up in his poem, the Hampshire landscape around Winchester, is also trembling on the brink of destruction. Winter will sweep in and, we all know, put an end to the warm tranquil landscape Keats was describing. It was poised, like the soldiers in ‘Spring Offensive’ on the brink of change.

   Owen’s poem begins with an image of ease: having walked up a long valley some of the soldiers ‘carelessly sleep’ (‘on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep’ - Keats) . On the march through the ‘warm field’ (‘until they think warm days will never cease’ – Keats ) ‘the buttercup had blessed with gold their slow boots coming up’(‘conspiring with him how to load and bless’ - Keats) and now, on the ridge, the soldiers who did not sleep looked back on the valley and saw ‘the long grass swirled by the May breeze’.

   ‘In a wailful choir the small gnats mourn’ wrote Keats in To Autumn; the grass that the soldiers look upon is ‘murmurous with wasp and midge’ and though ‘the summer oozed though their veins/Like an injected drug for their bodies’ pains’ ‘(Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours ….. Drowsed with the fume of poppies’ -Keats) they know this cannot last. ‘Sharp on their souls hung the imminent line of grass’; the ridge over which they would have make their attack and leave their temporary haven of warm restfulness behind is beckoning ominously.

   There are other echoes from Keats: The men who look back over the valley (‘Marvelling they stood’ seem like ‘stout Cortez’ looking for the first time on the Pacific in Keats’s On first looking into Chapman’s Homer). And a fragmentary line in Spring Offensive - ‘they breathe like trees unstirred’ – as well as the entirety of the poem’s first three stanzas - recall for me the deep stillness evoked in the opening lines of Keats’s ‘Hyperion’:

   Deep in the shady sadness of a vale

  Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,

  Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,

  Sat gray-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone,

  Still as the silence round about his lair;

  Forest on forest hung about his head

  Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,

  Not so much life as on a summer’s day

  Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass,

  But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.’

   The soldiers, one could say, were in that kind of suspended zone, it’s the same kind of atmosphere, and is, I would say, an importation of a tone and ambience originating in Keats’s work into the midst of a battle zone in 1917.

   'They remained there

   ‘Till like a cold gust thrills the little word

   At which each body and its soul begird

   And tighten them for battle’…..

   The order has come, and

  ‘Soon they topped the hill, and raced together

   Over an open stretch of herb and heather

   Exposed. And instantly the whole sky burned

   With fury against them; earth set sudden cups

   In thousands for their blood…..’

    And so Keats’s hidden destructive winter is brought into play by Wilfred Owen. He goes beyond Keats, or realizes the hidden and implicit element of To Autumn, and leaves him behind at that point.

  But he has used him, I would argue, to great effect, creating a hugely poignant contrast between images drawn from Keats relating to warmth, rest, peace, tranquillity and natural bounty and the hellish realities of the First World War.