Keats, Confessional Literature, Lyric Poetry, Reputation Presentation

John Keats

• Born in London on the 31st of October, 1975
• Educated at John Clarke's school in Einfield, which had both a more liberal outlook and a more modern curriculum compared to schools like Eton and Harrow
• Was interested in History and the Classics as a student, which would greatly influence his poetry
• After studying to become a doctor and receiving his apothecary license, which meant he could practice as a surgeon or a physician, Keats decided he wanted to become a poet

Confessional Literature

• Keats approached the relations among experience, imagination, art, and illusion with penetrating thoughtfulness, with neither sentimentality nor cynicism but with a delight in the ways in which beauty, in its own subtle and often surprising ways, reveals the truth.
• His art’s very form seems to embody and interpret the conflicts of mortality and desire.
• The urgency of this poetry has always appeared greater to his readers for his intense love of beauty and his tragically short life.
• "When I Have Fears" is a very personal confession of an emotion that intruded itself into the fabric of Keats' existence from at least 1816 on, the fear of an early death. In the poem, the existence of this fear annihilates both the poet's fame, which Keats ardently longed for, and the love that is so important in his poetry and in his life.

Lyric Poetry

• Romantic lyric poetry consists of 1^st person accounts of the thoughts and feelings of a specific moment
• Feelings are extreme, but personal
• Dissatisfied with the pressure of most lyric forms toward quick, neat solution, Keat’s new ode form satisfied him because it was sufficiently confining to challenge his conscience as a craftsman.
• In a letter to his brother Keats explained his new ode form: "I have been endeavoring to discover a better Sonnet stanza than we have. The legitimate does not suit the language well, from the pouncing rhymes; the other appears too elegaic [songlike, tuneful], and the couplet at the end of it has seldom a pleasing effect. I do not pretend to have succeeded. It will explain itself.”

Periodical Review

• In an 1817 article, John Wilson Croker attacked John Keats in a review of his work for his association with Leigh Hunt and the so-called "Cockney School" of poetry.
• Keats, for example, was accused of "low diction" for rhyming "thorns/fawns" in "Sleep and Poetry" and other rhymes which suggested a working class speech.
• One of the things that Keats is now most celebrated for is his use of language, particularly the sensuality of it. Most important to the poem is its concentration on imagery and allusion in its evocation of nature. The liveliness of the words he uses only enhance the feelings behind his poem. In “To Autumn” he uses sensual language to describe a scene of a lively autumn, using words that are full of the senses, such as touch, sight, and sound. In the first stanza he uses words such as “load”, “fill”, “ripeness”, “swell”, “plump”, ”sweet”, “budding”, which all aid in Keats description of the beauty in nature at the perfect end of a summer and the beginning of autumn, right before everything begins to rot, and eventually, die. Surprisingly, contemporary reviews considered Keats’ word choice to reflect his low class speech.
• John Gibson Lockhart wrote in Blackwoods Magazine that Keats was a member of “The Cockney School of Poetry” (Lockhart 519), a dismissive term to describe Keats and some of his contemporary poets who did not attend Eton or Oxford or Cambridge and were not from upper class backgrounds. The comment was dismissive in both a political and a literary sense, aimed at working class young writers deemed unworthy of the title of “poet” for their non-formal rhyming.
  The term, Cockney School of Poetry, was both a dismissive take of their aesthetics and an attack on their upbringing. Reviewers thought that there was no room for these poets among the greats of the era, especially considering the political revolutionary tone to many of Keats’s contemporaries.
• Contemporary critics immediately understood, and condemned, his radical associations, the political, reformist agenda and the democratic ideology of the cultural and class background of the authors being introduced as a mechanism of reform.

• Percy Shelley was accused of being similarly offensive politically, but the reviewers excused him for his genius (and, of course, his high birth).

 Reputation

• While largely criticized, with Lockhart going as far as to call Keats’s poetry “imperturbable driveling idiocy” (Lockhart 519)  Keats’s ability and talent was widely acknowledged and admired by several influential contemporaries such as Shelley and Hunt. They praised him for his quick thinking and his style; both beautiful and lively in it’s sensualities. When Keats died, Shelley proclaimed that his death had occurred because of bad reviews in the Quarterly Review. Shelley wrote about Keats’ death, referring to him as “the loveliest and the last, The bloom, whose petals nipped before they blew
Died on the promise of the fruit.” Keats’s sensual language, fanciful ideas, and simple rhyme scheme were some of the biggest reasons for his poor reception, but they are now a few of the most important reasons why he is such a beloved and such a widely read poet of today. He lived his life afraid of death and the finality of it, assuming the end of his life would also mean the end of his works circulation. In the years after his death and up until now, his genius has been widely proclaimed.

"I have left no immortal work behind me - nothing to make my friends proud of my memory - but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered." 

--Keats in a letter to Fanny Brawne before his death

Lockhart, John Gibson. “The Cockney School of Poetry No. IV” Blackwood’s Magazine August 1818