Two Prefaces to Endymion

Abstract

Two Prefaces to Endymion John Keats (bio) JOHN KEATS (1795–1821)—“nobody,” Kingsley Amis once wrote, “was ever more of a poet”—was the oldest child of the keeper of a livery stable in London who had married his employer’s daughter. The poet’s early education took place at a private school in Enfield, where he was encouraged in his reading by a teacher who himself aspired to a life in literature. When Keats was eight, his father was killed in a fall from a horse; when he was fourteen, his mother, whose re-marriage was an unhappy one, died of tuberculosis—which would prove to be a family affliction. In 1811, Keats’s schooling ended, and the guardian appointed to care for the children apprenticed him to a surgeon and apothecary. During his years of apprenticeship he became increasingly affected by the power of poetry—particularly that of Edmund Spenser, whose work he was initially moved to imitate. In the fall of 1815, Keats went on to further studies at Guy’s Hospital in London, and by the summer of the following year was certified to practice as a physician, surgeon, and apothecary; but before he achieved admission to the Royal College of Surgeons, he resolved to begin his career in poetry in earnest. He had not been writing long and his first attempts were not particularly memorable, but in the spring of 1816 an early sonnet, “O Solitude,” which reflected the clear influence of Wordsworth, was accepted by The Examiner, of which Leigh Hunt was the editor. This was Keats’s first published poem, and Hunt was confirmed in his assessment of the author’s gifts when in the fall of the next year he read “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” Keats had become part of Hunt’s literary circle, and Hunt showed the poet’s work to the Shelleys, William Godwin, and William Hazlitt. He was starting to publish regularly, and a first collection of his Poems appeared in the spring of 1817; it received respectful reviews but generated no great interest and Keats decided to change publishers and to embark on a more ambitious project, a long poem entitled Endymion, which he saw as an ultimate “trial of my Powers of Imagination and … invention.” During months of travel and preoccupation with a dismissive remark by Wordsworth and an implicit attack on his own literary ambitions in Blackwood’s articles directed condescendingly at “the Cockney school,” [End Page 188] he continued to work on the poem, completing it in December. Over the course of the fall, his intense involvement with Fanny Brawne had begun, and the grave illness of his younger brother Tom had become evident; by the middle of March, 1818, the lung hemorrhages were unmistakable. That same month, Keats finished copying out the manuscript and sent it to his publishers, along with a preface. Fearing that its apparent defensiveness would invite easy denigration, the publishers rejected that first preface; so Keats provided a second version. Both versions are presented in the pages that follow, and each of them reveals Keats’s unwavering determination, as well as his persistent uncertainty that he would ever achieve what he wanted most to do. In his 1817 poem “Sleep and Poetry,” he had written: “O for ten years, that I may overwhelm / Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed / That my own soul has to itself decreed.” His plea was not granted; his brother Tom died of tuberculosis in December of 1818 and the poet himself had begun to show the familiar ominous symptoms of the illness. But between January and September of 1819, Keats produced some of the greatest poetry ever written in the English language, including all of the famous Odes as well as “The Eve of Saint Agnes,” “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” and a number of extraordinary sonnets. Seeking relief from his illness, he traveled to Rome, where at the age of twenty-five he died in February of 1821; he is buried there in the Protestant Cemetery. It was his wish that the stone marking his grave bear no name or date, but only these words: “Here lies One...