Posthumous Keats

By Stanley Plumly
WW Norton

I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.
- John Keats to his brother George.

Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
- Keats’s epitaph, written by him just before he died

John Keats is the epitome—ah, alas!—of the genius artist who died too young. The ravage of tuberculosis felled him early after he wrote his immortal poems and—equally immortal—a large collection of the most illuminating, often funny and quick-witted, and astonishingly modern letters ever penned. As the epistles show, he was noble of character without being the least starched, though he could be thorny when faced with political injustice, tedious company, or second-rate poetry.

Keats was born in 1795. In September of 1820, he sailed to Italy on a gamble, hoping to affect his recovery in a dry and sunny climate, instead of the certain death that awaited him in one more damp, bone-chilling British winter. He died in Rome in February of 1821, attended by one devoted friend, in a house right next to the Spanish Steps. This house, at 26 Piazza di Spagna, is now the Keats-Shelley Museum.

Between the two quotations that begin this review there are about three years. The confidence Keats shows in the first quote about his skill as a poet seems utterly vanished by the time he dictates the words that will appear on his tombstone. And yet in the brief span that separates them, Keats writes the “Ode to a Nightingale”, the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, and the ode “To Autumn.”

There is nothing to choose among the odes, though it could be said that "To Autumn"—only three stanzas of eleven lines each and employing an omniscient voice—may be the finest lyric poem ever written. It makes most lyric poems seem crabbed and dwarfed because the ode transcends the limitations of the genre to become nearly an epic in terms of its content—its created space—despite its material brevity. Stanley Plumly devotes a number of excellent pages to this poem. These pages are alone worth the price of admission to his book.

The odes are gorgeous in imagery, profound in idea, and beyond compare in terms of their musicality, craft, and poetic achievement. Keats wrote these poems in a bunch, with others as well, between spring and fall of 1819. It was his last, fantastic spurt of creative energy before his first TB haemorrhage in the early winter of 1820. He had nursed his mother and his brother to their premature ends with the same disease, so when he saw his own blood on the pillow, he knew it was a "death warrant" (his words).

Perhaps only Shakespeare is consistently Keats’s equal as an English poet, and Keats may have the upper hand in lyric sense. He also wrote “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and “When I have fears that I might cease to be”, two of the greatest sonnets written not just in English, but in that structure, period, and the structure has a seven-hundred-year history in half a dozen languages. So long as one person left in the world can read English and loves poetry, Keats’s verse will endure.

Stanley Plumly’s superb new book about Keats’s work and travails is not biography, although it contains many biographical details. It is more, as he says, a work of “reflection, contemplation, meditation” and is circular rather than linear in narrative. Centrally, it is about Keats’s “posthumous life.” Keats himself coined the phrase. He referred to the last months of his life as his posthumous existence.

It didn’t always seem likely that we would still read Keats 187 years after his death. It fact, it didn’t seem likely at all. Though he knew Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley, the other British poets of the Romantic era, his first book had been savaged by a right-wing critic (Keats held liberal views). The book of his poems published in 1820 containing the famous odes received good notices, but by then Keats was slipping away and had essentially ceased writing.

A story began that the vicious notice of his first book was what initiated Keats's decline, that he was tainted unto death by the review. Thus, his disease was due to a weak, oversensitive mind. This lie was abetted by the fact that nothing was understood of TB at the time. Germ theory was unknown, and TB was just one of the "wasting" diseases such as cancer, syphilis, and depression. Several doctors, including a "pulmonary specialist", diagnosed Keats and determined that his mind and stomach were what ailed him. On his death, a partial autopsy was performed. Nothing remained of his lungs but a blackened cavity. The attending physician could not fathom how Keats had lived so long.

Plumly traces this story and also depicts how Keats was "beautified" by posterity, especially by his friends, in images painted of him in oil and prose, often long after his death. He was idealized as the "dew-eyed-poet" and botoxed to be made "generic and saleable." Keats, says Plumly, became "a rumour of himself, passed along into immortality through central casting." The adjective "poor" became the preferred way to describe him, as in "poor Keats." This severely diminished the extraordinarily animated, energetic, and intelligent person Keats was before TB struck him down.

These same friends, convinced of his genius, promised themselves and each other that they would write a biography of him. Instead of doing so, they quarreled over his literary remains, as well as what would be inscribed on his tombstone. It was not until well toward the end of the nineteenth century that the first full biography appeared and Keats’s reputation grew. By then, all his old friends were dead.

Beyond the odes and letters, Keats is justly renowned for his critical acumen, the poetic romances (“The Eve of St Agnes” is the best example), and some graceful, highly quotable abstractions such as “A thing of beauty is a joy forever:/Its loveliness increases; It will never/Pass into nothingness.”

He could also incise a small, unforgettable image with the best of them. To illustrate, and to brighten your day in conclusion, following are a few lines from his poem "I Stood Tip-toe." He observes minnows basking in warm sunlight that falls on a clear, cold stream. Particularly adept and economical in expression is the way the minnows disappear in a flick at the shadow of a hand – and just as suddenly reappear. Keats accomplishes this kinetic portrait deftly in rhymed couplets, not the most flexible poetic form in which to achieve naturalness and nimbleness of voice.

…Where swarms of minnows show their little heads,
Staying their wavy bodies 'gainst the streams,
To taste the luxury of sunny beams
Temper'd with coolness. How they ever wrestle
With their own sweet delight, and ever nestle
Their silver bellies on the pebbly sand.
If you but scantily hold out the hand,
That very instant not one will remain;
But turn your eye, and there they are again.

Review by Neil Flowers