Keats's Life Research Articles

John Keats: A New: Life by Nicholas Roe

Nicholas Roe. John Keats: A New Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Pp. xxvii+446. $22. On 8 July 1819 under a full moon, John Keats wrote in one of his first letters to Fanny Brawne about a comet that was burning through the heavens over London for several consecutive nights that month, an astronomical phenomenon that he marks out emotionally as a figuration of the woman with whom he was falling deeply in love: have seen your Comet, he told her (331). As Nicholas Roe explains in this pathbreaking biography of Keats, [n]ight after night Fanny's comet hung brightly overhead, apparently as stationary and unchanging as the stars yet in reality a transient visitor returned fleetingly from its long traverse, a cosmological experience that, Roe suggests, likely allowed Keats to unlock his sentiments and passions and compose his sonnet (c. 1819), memorializing his relationship with Brawne (331). Having conscientiously studied John Bonnycastle's An Introduction to Astronomy (1807) during his schoolboy days at Clarke's Academy at Enfield in suburban London, Keats had been, since his early youth, a careful watcher of the skies, and his preoccupation with the heavens and their constellations carried on even into his painful final letter to Charles Annitage Brown of 30 November 1820, less than three months before the poet died in Rome of tuberculosis in the winter of 1821, aged 25: have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence, wrote Keats, There was my star predominant! (390). Following Keats's lead, Roe is correct to make much throughout his biography of the subtle yet crucial ways in which the poet came to associate his life with the heavens above him, and while this feature of Roe's book might initially appear as simply a minor, artful motif, this aspect of the biography runs from the first to the final chapter and is symptomatic of a broader, transformative approach to representing and understanding Keats's life as a whole. For Roe, Keats was always keenly aware of the ways in which the physical universe enveloping him and unfolding around him came to shape his inner emotions, thoughts, sensations, questions, compulsions, and convictions. Such an approach to Keats is a critical one for Roe to adopt because it allows him to break away from a longstanding tradition of thinking about and depicting Keats's life as one primarily (if not utterly) determined by and enacted within what Paul de Man regarded as the abstract intellectual space of the aesthetic realm. Of course, de Man's attribution simply followed suit with much earlier imaginings of Keats, such as those famously provided by Oscar Wilde and others who envisioned him as a tragically divine emotional spirit disconnected from the worlds of reality around him. Likewise, Wilde's understanding of Keats can itself be traced back to both Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, who in Adonais (1821) and Don Juan (1819-24), respectively, established Keats in terms of Romantic myth as a figure of legendary genius with a troubled soul. This Romantic vision of Keats as a delicate mental and spiritual essence not meant for a long mortal life set the stage for a range of twentieth-century biographers who similarly came to see the poet as a tragic creature, such that when Andrew Motion largely represented Keats in these terms in his magisterial Keats: A Biography (1997), he was following in the footsteps of Amy Lowell and her much earlier two-volume John Keats (1925), perhaps the most important early twentieth-century biography to cast the poet in this light. Furthermore, a number of twenty-first-century critics and artists have generally taken this route as well--including Stanley Plumly (2008) and Jane Campion, whose film Bright Star (2009), focusing on the tragic final three years of the poet's life and especially his heartrending relationship with Brawne, was inspired by and modeled upon Motion's book. …

The Austen Effect: Remaking Romantic History as a Novel of Manners

2009 release of Star, Jane Campion's film about John Keats's last years and his relationship with Fanny Brawne, engendered a range of reactions. Writing for Guardian, Peter Bradshaw contended, The movie is vulnerable to mockery or irony from pundits who might feel that ... their appreciation of the poet exceeds that of the director. Nonetheless, think it is a deeply felt and intelligent film, one of those that has grown in my mind on a second viewing; it is almost certainly the best of Campion's career. A. O. Scott of New York Times and Frances Wilson in the Times Literary Supplement likewise praised Campion's focus on the end of Keats's life through the lens of his love for Brawne. As Bradshaw anticipated, however, the response from academics was considerably more circumspect. One of the most vocal critics of was Christopher Ricks, who took issue with both the actors' voicing of Keats's poems and with Jane Campion's more general approach to dramatizing Keats's lyricism. In New York Review of Books, Ricks singles out Campion's literal-minded approach of providing concrete visual analogs for the images invoked in Keats's poems; a film should, above all, never offer simple of the very things that a great writer has superbly--by means of the chosen medium of words alone--enabled us to imagine, to picture. A film that proceeds to furnish competing pictures of its own will render pointless the previous acts of imagination that it purports to respect or to honor. For among the accomplishments of the poet is that he or she brings it about that we see with the mind's eye, as against the eye of flesh (46). Ricks is not saying that poetry in general, or Keats's poetry in particular, is hostile to the cinematic imagination; rather, he finds fault with Campion's use of literal visual analogs for Keats's poetic images. For her part, Campion has identified her primary source material as Keats's correspondence, rather than his poetry: I read all the letters. didn't read all the poems. Then worked out a storyline (Sullivan 87). Accordingly, during a voiceover sequence in in which Keats (Ben Whishaw) reads from a letter he wrote to Fanny about a walk on seashore, the audience sees a shot of Whishaw standing on a beach looking at the ocean. Similarly, when Whishaw's Keats recites the sonnet Bright Star to Abbie Cornish's Brawne, he utters the speaker's sensation of being pillowed on my fair love's breast as he is, literally, resting his head on Cornish's bosom. shortcomings Ricks describes are perhaps difficult to avoid in a film with some extremely ambitious aims. In the panel discussion on the film at the New York Public Library in September, 2009, Timothy Corrigan interpreted Campion's focus on Brawne as a feminist intervention even as the director also sought to introduce Keats's achievement to a mainstream, contemporary audience. Campion's dual goal of entertaining and educating reflects the ideological legacy of its producers, which were public service broadcasters from Australia (Screen Australia) and the UK (BBC films). goal of education and entertainment has been an established part of public service broadcasting, particularly in the British commonwealth, since the earliest days (the 1920s) of the BBC under its first general director, Lord John Reith; a film about Keats would certainly seem to fall within the remit of organizations like the BBC, charged with cultivating a collective appreciation of British cultural traditions. Part of making Keats's life story and work accessible to a wide public means, for Campion, situating that work within a visual formula that straightforwardly translates imaginative transformation into concrete images. Rather than attempting to defamiliarize our experience, Campion aims to make Keats's language familiar by presenting tactile and visually knowable origins for his linguistic processing of reality. …

Reading Keats, Thinking Politics: An Introduction

MARKING THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM, THIS special issue, Reading Keats, Thinking Politics, revisits topic of a collection that appeared midway into journal's history. Published in Summer 1986 under guest-editorship of Susan Wolfson, and brought together two terms that seemed present an improbable conjunction. Wolfson cannily observed in introduction the general critical tendency that time to regard very conjunction of 'Keats' and 'politics' as something of a metaphysical conceit. (1) According long-held assumptions about relationship between literature and politics, appeared be pre-eminently apolitical or even anti-political Romantic poet, dreamer who evaded topical issues and whose well-wrought productions aspired a realm of timeless beauty. Since 1980s, conjunction of Keats and has served effectively catalyze a number of diverse critical approaches. Presenting a collection of exciting new work, this issue invites scholars and critics re-engage with how Keats's poetry related questions of politics. The 1986 issue was responding most immediately new historicist reading of Keats's poetry as escaping or suppressing its context. This perspective had been most visibly and powerfully spelled out in Jerome McGann's 1979 essay, and Historical Method in Literary Criticism. McGann's most stringent critique focused on To Autumn, which he argued is an attempt 'escape' period which provides poem with its and offer its readers same opportunity for refreshment. (2) The politics that new historicism found in Keats's poetry was its (politically) reactionary denial of context, which McGann defined as the Terror, King Ludd, Peterloo, Six Acts, and recurrent financial crises of Regency (53, 61). From this perspective, categories of text and literature and politics, and poetry and history presented an intractable and ideologically suspect divide. Complicating that divide, 1986 SiR issue began indicate in diverse ways an engaged dimension Keats's poetry of which we had not been taking account (KP, 196). Morris Dickstein found in Hyperion a vital subtext in its goal of ultimate social renovation by way of disinterested exertions of art (KP, 181); William Keach established radical implications of Keats's cockney couplets; David Bromwich reminded us that Keats's reviewers found his early poetry at once enervatingly luxurious and transparently political and that Keats's letters reveal an abiding concern with issues (KP, 199); Paul Fry showed us in To Autumn not an escape from conflict, but a timely refusal sublimate mortality as a social conspiracy (KP, 219); and Alan Bewell argued that poetry embodied a identification with the suffering and silence of outsiders (KP, 229). With these essays, question about and changed a question of Keats's politics. What followed were a number of books that illuminated ways of reading Keats's politics through historical contexts that these studies worked restore our critical imagination. Marjorie Levinson's extraordinary Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (1988) foregrounded class politics of vituperative socio-sexual attacks on from conservative press as well as from Lord Byron. Levinson argued in sustained readings of romances that Keats's poetry achieved its greatness when he signified his overdetermined class alienation from his materia poetica. Building on Levinson's cultural materialism, studies such as Daniel Watkins's Keats's Poetry and Politics of Imagination (1989) and Nicholas Roe's John and Culture of Dissent (1997) illuminated politics of Keats's reading and how it might have formed his thinking. …

'And Doubly Sweet a Brotherhood in Song': Allusion and Imitation in Tony Harrison's A Kumquat for John Keats

This essay argues that poetic allusion and imitation are among Tony Harrison's chief means of representing his relationship to Keats in A Kumquat for John Keats (1981). A detailed analysis of the poem occasions further engagement with questions about the usefulness of reception as a critical tool. What can Harrison's emulation of Keats teach us about reading Keats? How may Harrison's response to Keats aid us in redefining our conceptions of the Romantic poet? Harrison's remarkably ‘strong’ allusive reading of Keats, it is argued, enlists familiarity with Keats's life and letters to move beyond the biographical fixation which has so far characterized the greater part of Keats's reception among the poets.

Twentieth‐ and Twenty‐first‐century Keats Criticism

AbstractThis essay offers a survey of major twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century interpretations of Keats's life and work. Mapping lines of influence between distinctive formal, theoretical and historical approaches to Keats's oeuvre, I highlight significant critical trends and areas of recurrent formal and thematic interest in Keats studies. When appropriate, current confluences between these theoretical and historical methodologies are noted. Given the wide scope of material available, prominence has been given to those projects (where possible, emphasis is given to critical books) which both represent particular twentieth‐century critical perspectives or thematic concerns and are important studies in themselves. This survey closes by indicating potential areas for future research and observes that many twentieth‐century critical viewpoints and issues remain vital to Keats studies at the start of the twenty‐first century.

Keats's Way of Salvation

Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence.--Leon Bloy (1) KEATS WAS AN INVETERATE SEARCHER AFTER TRUTH RATHER THAN ONE who ever felt he had firm grasp of it. As he wrote to Benjamin Bailey, have not one Idea of the truth of any of my speculations. (2) He lived, if any poet ever did, in Negative Capability--in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason (Letters 1: 193). For all this, though, he never stopped searching; just weeks after his remark to Bailey he wrote to his publisher: find I can have no enjoyment in the World but continual drinking of Knowledge (Letters I: 271). As Dennis Haskell writes, like all poets he was implicitly concerned with questions of Unlike most poets he was also often explicitly concerned with the question of truth. (3) It is curious, then, that the critical view of Keats that has reigned virtually unchallenged through much of the twentieth century, at least since the 1940s, sees him as kind of modern skeptic, fully in tune with the values of post-Christian era. The work of Hoxie Neale Fairchild and Edward Bostetter may be cited as symptomatic, and Ronald Sharp's important study, Keats, Skepticism, and the Religion of Beauty, articulates the case fully and impressively. (4) It was not until the publication of Robert Ryan's Keats: The Religious Sense in 1976 that this orthodoxy came to be seriously questioned. (5) Since then, however, there has been relatively little study of issues in Keats. As Robert Prescott wrote in splendidly wide-ranging review of this question, because Ryan's work is so thorough, critics have made little more of the nature of Keats's more private thought. (6) When Ryan published Keats: The Religious Sense, over twenty-five years ago, my review in the Keats-Shelley Journal noted that one of the most remarkable things about this book is that it hadn't been written before. And yet it was perhaps only after it was written that one realized how much it had been needed. We do not, after all, commonly think of Keats as religious poet. And yet Ryan's book made convincing case that religion and speculation played far greater role in Keats's life, and in the forming of his imagination, than we had allowed ourselves to believe. Keats: The Religious Sense is not study of Keats's poetry. Ryan chose rather to focus on his life--and especially his letters--as means of determining the shape and evolution of Keats's personal creed. Because he finds the elements of Keats's poetry to be in large measure untraditional, Ryan suggests that it is helpful first to come to some understanding of Keats's basic theological point of view outside the poetry. He offers his study, therefore, as a sort of prolegomenon or preface to any further examination of the aspects of Keats's verse, as well as to the study of his most important pronouncements on the nature of poetry (6). The purpose of this essay is to apply Ryan's reading of Keats's life to the poet's great letter of spring 1819 to George and Georgiana Keats--notably the vale of soul-making passage--and to the poems most intimately linked with it: the Ode to Psyche and The Fall of Hyperion. In approaching dimensions of Keats's poetry, I suggest that middle path may be taken between, on the one hand, thoroughgoing skeptical and secularizing view and, on the other, view that would baptize Keats into something approaching Christian orthodoxy. As Prescott justly observes, we must pay serious attention to the deep ambivalence evident in Keats's (22), and sedulously avoid the error of militantly secularist critics in their imposition of subtle exclusion principle: the idea that since the poems and letters voice in places skeptical secularism, that the content of the same letters should therefore be ignored or devalued (23). …

Charles Cowden Clarke and the Leigh Hunt Circle 1812–1818

The relationship between Keats and Charles Cowden Clarke, first his teacher and later his friend, was formative. It was particularly important in the years when Keats was apprenticed to Thomas Hammond in Edmonton between leaving Enfield School in summer 1811 and starting his medical studies in London in October 1815. Cowden Clarke's recollections of this period, written much later, are the main, indeed, apart from the poems, virtually the only evidence for Keats's biography in these years. Clarke was also responsible for Keats's introduction to Leigh Hunt in autumn 1816 and remained friendly with both. The Novello-Cowden Clarke Collection, in the Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds, contains a significant body of either partially published, or wholly unpublished, material which adds to our knowledge of Clarke and his role in the Leigh Hunt circle between 1812 and 1818. One item, Clarke's substantial Commonplace Book, mainly filled in between 1810 and 1814, has been the subject of two essays,1 and was featured in the bicentenary Keats exhibition at Dove Cottage in summer 1995. Additional material in the Collection gives further information about Clarke's childhood, his early acquaintance with Charles Oilier, and, most importantly, his relationship with Leigh Hunt. The largest body of evidence is provided by the series of letters between Hunt and Clarke from July 1813 until December 1818 used by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke in the preparation of Recollections of Writers (1878). This early part of the life-long correspondence between Hunt and Clarke gives details of the two men's relationship during Keats's life. Full

Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style. Keats, Marjorie Levinson

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsKeats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style. Keats, Marjorie LevinsonLeon WaldoffLeon Waldoff Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 88, Number 1Aug., 1990 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/391833 Views: 4Total views on this site Copyright 1990 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style

La Belle Dame Sans Merci The Eve of St Agnes and The Fall of Hyperion early poems Lamia.

REVIEWS

REVIEWS Get access Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style. By MARJORIE LEVINSON. Pp. vi+346. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988. £27.50 net. VINCENT NEWEY VINCENT NEWEY University of Liverpool Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XLI, Issue 162, May 1990, Pages 271–272, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XLI.162.271 Published: 01 May 1990

Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style

Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style

Review: Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style., by Marjorie Levinson

Review: <i>Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style.</i>, by Marjorie Levinson

Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style. Marjorie Levinson.

Previous articleNext article No AccessKeats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style. Marjorie Levinson.Jeffrey C. RobinsonJeffrey C. Robinson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 20, Number 4Autumn 1989 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24042543 Views: 2Total views on this site © 1989 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Reviews

Journal Article Reviews Get access M. Levinson , Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style . Pp. viii+346 . Oxford : Basil Blackwell , 1988 . £27.50. MIRIAM ALLOTT MIRIAM ALLOTT The University of Liverpool Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 36, Issue 3, September 1989, Pages 405–407, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/36-3-405 Published: 01 September 1989

Keats and James and The Princess Casamassima

H ALFWAY THROUGH The Princess Casamassima, in chapter 22, as grave automatic servant filled his glass with a liquor, Hyacinth, a guest at the Princess' country house, is reminded ... of some lines of Keats in the 'Ode to a Nightingale.' He wondered if he should hear a nightingale at Medley.' By this one explicit reference to Keats's poem, James, in his characteristic fashion,2 calls our attention to a whole body of Keatsian material that is folded into the book. It has been overlooked because the story is primarily a rich, dense, political and social novel, although much of it relies on references to many other works of literature. In this Bildungsroman recognizable allusions to Keats's poetry and to the legend of Keats's life underline Hyacinth's conflict between the aesthetic and the socially dedicated life.