At the beginning of his poetic vocation, John Keats had resolved to follow the examples of two great poets: Edmund Spenser and John Milton. As they did, he too intended to write pastoral poems, then progress to epic verse. Keats wanted to imitate the pattern of these earlier poets as a means to achieve the same level of profundity they did. He laid out this scheme in his early poem, Sleep and Poetry. In the spring of 1818, he published his pastoral romance, Endymion, inspired by his reading of Spenser, but he included a preface specifying deficiencies he anticipated critics would observe in his work. His preface to the poem eloquently expresses his concerns:
“Knowing within myself the manner in which this Poem has been produced, it is not without a feeling of regret that I make it public.
What manner I mean, will be quite clear to the reader, who must soon perceive great inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished.”
In January of that same year, Keats was about to revise the second book of Endymion; he put aside the poem and decided to reread King Lear instead. His rereading inspired the following sonnet:
On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again
O golden-tongued Romance with serene lute!
Fair plumed Syren! Queen of far away!
Leave melodizing on this wintry day,
Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute:
Adieu! for once again the fierce dispute,
Betwixt damnation and impassion'd clay
Must I burn through; once more humbly assay
The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit.
Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,
Begetters of our deep eternal theme,
When through the old oak forest I am gone,
Let me not wander in a barren dream,
But when I am consumed in the fire,
Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.
As honestly critical as he is in his preface, his sonnet radiates a critical turn in Keats’s aspiration as a poet. At this specific stage in his poetic development, he knows he must move beyond writing pastoral poetry and ascend to the realm of genuinely greater human passions. The first two lines, which refer to Endymion, acknowledge the lure of writing pastoral poetry (“Fair plumed Syren!). Lines three and four, however, want to silence the pastoral impulse within his imagination. Once silenced (“mute”), Keats signals his farewell (to composing) to pastoral poetry (“Adieu!”) and directs his imagination to “burn through” the “fierce dispute,/Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay” of Shakespeare’s Lear. For Keats, Shakespeare has always been a force within his consciousness, but at this point in his life Shakespeare assumes a kind of divinity that he approaches humbly as he invokes his aid to raise him out of a “barren dream” and transmute him like the newly born “Phoenix” into a poet who can “fly” to greater heights of poetic glory.
Keats continued to revere Spenser and Milton, and one can continually sense their essential presence in his poetry, but he also understood that for him to become a great poet he needed to “find the agonies, the strife/Of human hearts'' and, distill these passions into sublime poetry. He found those emotions in Shakespeare, who along with Spenser and Milton, empowered Keats to write his greatest poetry in the few years he lived after finishing Endymion.
One of Keats’s greatest poems is Ode to a Nightingale. In the poem, Keats is listening to an unseen Nightingale, whose song lures him into a trance-like state of mind:
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
The effect of the nightingale’s song is astonishing. It draws Keats into a trance-like state as he becomes intoxicated by the beauty of the song. He feels as though a “drowsy numbness pains” his consciousness; as though he had swallowed poison (hemlock); or had quaffed an opiate that is pulling him into the Greek river of forgetfulness (“Lethe-wards). As he experiences the bird’s beautiful song, he tells the unseen nightingale that he is not envious of the bird’s “happy lot” but simply “too happy in thine happiness.”
However, this is no simple poem about the ecstatic joy that can be found through nature. In the next two stanzas, Keats longs for a “beaker full” of wine, to escape this world and to efface his knowledge of the grim suffering that life can inflict. (His younger brother Tom had recently died of tuberculosis). In stanza 4, he seems to unite with the nightingale, as he rejects wine as a source of inspiration and turns instead to poetic imagination (poetic fancy), “wings of Poesy.” As his imagination soars above the terrestrial world, he envisions the “Queen-Moon” (stanza 4) on her throne surrounded by fairies, but he realizes immediately that there is only darkness (“no light”) in the realm of “starry Fays. “[E]mbalmed” in “darkness” (stanza 5) and unable to see “what flowers are at [his] feet,” he can “guess” each “soft incense” they emit. Fully absorbed in a trance-like state without the sense of sight (Darkling), he listens to the nightingale, and muses on the peacefulness of oblivion (stanza 6): “Now more than ever seems it rich to die,/To cease upon a midnight with no pain.” (It is in this stanza that one finds allusions to Shakespeare, specifically the play Hamlet). Longing for “easeful death" has supplanted the feeling of taking an opiate in stanza 1. In stanza 7, the bird’s song evokes the healing power of the Nightingale's song through time immemorial. But suddenly, Keats is abruptly called back to reality by a single word that conveys the despair he wants to escape, “Forlorn” (stanza 8). As startling as the opening of the poem is for the reader, the last stanza astounds both the reader and Keats to an even greater degree. The word “Forlorn” summons Keats back to the world of reality, pulling him from the faeryland trance he entered through the nightingale’s song. As he awakens from his trance, the nightingale flies away, and he bids it “Adieu” as its “plaintive anthem fades/Past the near meadows”...till “‘tis buried deep/In the next valley glades.” Once the bird’s song has “fled,” he is left wondering whether he experienced a “vision, or waking dream?”
The poem ends with Keats unable to discern whether or not he has had a “vision” or has merely been lost in a “dream.” What is not lost, however, is the significance of his experience. The nightingale, no less mortal and like Keats and all humanity, will in its own time perish. What will persist through time is its song as it is heard by successive generations. Though the bird will die, the time and change-defying persistence of its song make it immortal, and it is in listening and meditating (and composing the poem) on that song that Keats gathers to himself a sense of the immortal.
In the ode that follows Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Keats examines (in the sense of both study and question) a work of art. Unlike Nightingale, Keats removes himself personally from the poem, creating a speaker who approaches the urn objectively, and philosophically. The poem begins with the speaker viewing the urn and assigning it a higher artistic value than the very poem he is composing:
Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
In the first four lines of Grecian Ode, the speaker displays a confidence in what he thinks he knows as he describes and defines the urn in its entirety as a physical work of art above his artistic/poetic capability. In the next four lines he focuses on the painted scenes and figures on the urn, and his matter of fact declarative sentences give way to questions attempting to elicit from the urn a definitive and detailed account of what and whom these images are depicting. The speaker might seem at a loss once his eyes close in on the urn’s images, but his questions are rhetorical rather than literal. In Nightingale Keats wants to surrender his consciousness to the bird’s song and “leave the world unseen,/And with thee [nightingale] fade away into the forest dim.” Here, the speaker might seem dependent on the urn for inspiration in some way analogous to the way Keats clearly is in Nightingale, but he maintains an objectivity even as the urn’s aesthetic beauty fires his imagination.
That objectivity formulates the speaker’s declaration in the second stanza that unheard melodies “Are sweeter” than those heard. The silent pipers resonate in the speaker’s imagination and will continue to be “sweet” to those who come long after Keats to see and respond to this work of art. As in the first stanza, the lines that follow the initial four zoom in on the specific figures on the urn. Existing in perpetuity (on the urn), the lovers will never fade and even though their passion will never be consummate, the speaker professes that their eternal youth and love negates their unfulfilled passion.
In the third stanza, the speaker continues his fervent, joyful observations of the trees and lovers depicted on the urn. He celebrates the timeless “happy boughs,” the forever “unwearied” “melodist,” and the inextinguishable love and youthfulness of the “Bold Lover” and the female, “For ever panting, and for ever young.” His feelings of euphoria ebb temporarily when reality edges back into his consciousness and he articulates vicissitudes of human passion and love:
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
After this brief intrusion of reality, the speaker again concentrates on the urn. The fourth stanza mirrors the first as the air of distant history and mysterious, mythological ritual returns. The speaker wonders who the priest and the crowd approaching the “green altar” are. Then he ponders: “What little town by river or sea shore,/Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel/Is empty of this folk, pious morn?” The first question examines the urn’s scene and figures, but the second contemplates something beyond this self-contained artifact, a space purely imagined, the forever empty, silent and desolate town.
Perhaps it is the drift into that “desolate” space that compels the speaker to refocus on the complete urn and consecrate it as a silent, though eternal form that,
shalt remain, in the midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
These three poems of Keats demonstrate a crucial element of 19th Century English Romantic poetry, (1798-1832). The poets of the previous period (Neoclassical) stressed the importance of objectivity, restraint and logic in their poems. The Romantics, beginning with William Wordsworth, rejected this approach in favor of expressing emotions and unleashing the imagination. The difference can be summed up by comparing two statements regarding poetic intentions from Alexander Pope (18th Century poet) and Wordsworth:
'Tis more to guide, than spur the Muse's steed;
Restrain his fury, than provoke his speed;
The winged courser, like a gen'rous horse,
Shows most true mettle when you check his course.
Pope, An Essay on Criticism
“I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of Powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility; the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.”
Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads
The distinction between these two modes of poetic creativity is Pope’s principle that inspiration (“Muse’s steed”) needs to be reigned in, to be harnessed, in order to construct a poem, as opposed to Wordsworth’s belief that poetic creativity arises when the poet feels an initial emotion, recalls that emotion later in a state of “tranquility,” then re-absorbs that emotion completely into his consciousness until it becomes innate and organic within his imagination. Two other English poets who believed in the organic power of the imagination were Samuel Taylor Coleridge (a close friend of Wordsworth) and Percy Bysshe Shelley. These three poets, and Keats, wrote some of the greatest poetry one could read. But because Keats's poems can be difficult for someone new to his poetry, readers might avoid his poetry and unfortunately miss out on an experience that is superbly imaginative. With patience, a little resolve and perhaps some critical aid, anyone can learn to love this poet (and many more) if given the chance.