A Brief Introduction before the Introduction

Welcome all one of you. (Well, I'm making this public, so maybe more than one now.)

Although a hard copy has already been provided, here's a new new way to look at Keats. (It's like a new new car, much better than just a new car.) (Of course, the rest of you don't have hard copies, this is part of a graduate English class at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. It's my version of an anarcho-scholastic approach to Keats.)

The pages are in order, first page being the most recent. (I'd like to continue this actually, as I find new links online or come across interesting references. I never did get to examine Negative Capability as much as I wanted.)

I hope it gives you a new way of reading what you've already got. (Anarcho-scholasticism was coined by Stephen Collis, as a way to describe, basically, a new way to study academic topics with a creative eye. For this project, we had to pick a poet we were obsessed with. Everyone seemed surprised that I'd pick a Britsh Romantic. Go figure.)

Does the blogger version make a difference in the message? (Which the rest of you can't answer without the hard copy for comparison, but still, does the variation n layout make a difference?)

John Keats, alias Junkets, Welcome

Encountering the Poet Behind the Text Curtain








By Sabrina Favors






Eng 716C
S. Schultz
May 2008

Wouldn't it be nice to have a drink at Manoa Gardens with Shakespeare, Keats, and Mary Shelley?

Songs of Poets dead and gone,
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?
Have ye tippled drink more fine
Than mine host’s Canary wine?
Or are fruits of Paradise
Sweeter than those dainty pies
Of venison? O generous food!
Drest as though bold Robin Hood
Would, with his maid Marian,
Sup and bowse from horn and can.

I have heard that on a day
Mine host’s sign-board flew away,
Nobody knew whither, till
An astrologer’s old quill
To a sheepskin gave the story,
Said he saw you in your glory,
Underneath a new old sign
Sipping beverage divine,
And pledging with contented smack
The Mermaid in the Zodiac.

Souls of Poets dead and gone,
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?

Lines on the Mermaid Tavern, 1818[1]



Struggling to make a living through his passion, John Keats never forgot the influences of the past. From the medieval writers to Shakespeare to Spenser to his own contemporaries like Wordsworth and Shelley, Keats’ influences threaded their way through his writing.

“To the Romantics, the stories of days gone by were vastly preferable to the uninspiring intellect of the neoclassical age in which they were living,” (Egendorf, 14).

The spiral turns again. Writers of today look at the medieval writers (Bede or the troubadours), Shakespeare, Spenser and his fairy queen, on to Keats and the other Romantic poets, and then to later writers—C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Neil Gaiman (who wrote his own Sandman version of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream) and Charles de Lint. Every writer whose work we read bears an imprint on our writing, whether we know it or not.



[1] From “Representative Poetry Online.” Viewed May 4, 2008.

Enter teh Intarweb, stage right

At first glance, Keats’ influence on my own writing doesn’t strike me as apparent, and one might wonder how a British Romantic writer has any bearing on the younger generations of the 21st century. Then one might visit Google, or YouTube. In the hallowed halls of the internet, Keats is alive and well, even though he died one hundred and eighty-seven years ago.

Over four million results when searching for five little letters.


According to Heather Coombs, in English Romanticism by Laura Egendorf, “Keats’ way of ‘benefitting’ the world, then, is to concentrate upon what he calls ‘the principle of beauty in all things’,” (19). Perhaps, given how pervasive Keats seems to be, he benefitted the world in a different way. The question, then, is what way?

“For what has made the sage or poet write…But the fair paradise of Nature’s light,” (Egendorf 27).

“…If Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all,” (Coombs 46).

“When I have fears that I may cease to be/before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain…”[1]


[1] Unless otherwise stated, all poems by Keats are from The Selected Poetry of Keats, edited by Paul de Man. A full citing can be found on the Bibliography page.

If you were stuck on a deserted island, what would you bring?

Keats said all these things. It’s as if writing was everything for him. One may talk of his love for Fanny Brawne, or for his siblings, or the tragedy of his life—all the occasions where he may have given up the pen for more worldy concerns—but still he wrote. I can only speak for myself, one voice among thousands, millions, but more than any stirring turn of phrase, more than any one line that brings tears to my eyes or grips my attention relentlessly, it is Keats’ unending passion for writing that draws me to him. The stirring turns of phrases may have introduced me, and still find ways to captivate me, but I am a writer. If I could do anything, it would be to write. If I could only do one thing, it would be to write. If I was stuck on a deserted island with only three things, they items would be a pen that would never run out of ink, paper that had no end, and my library.

(I should like to say, as a third item, my volume of poetry by Keats, but as a lover of books, I could no more chose a single favorite than I could pick one food to eat for eternity—I’d rather starve than risk gorging myself on one writer only to become sick of it and regurgitate their words.)

My first memory of Keats comes from high school, although I suspect he lurked within anthologies of earlier school years without my noticing.

To: Pick a Season

In between stanzas of poem, analysis,

how I came to be attracted to Keats.

Season of ice and snowy drifts…
Is this how they all begin?
A dedication to stereotype?
Perhaps it’s just me,
amateur mind,
Or the curmudgeonly thoughts
Seven years later
Cynic.

I wrote my first poem in sixth grade.

I titled it Alone.

“O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell

Let it not be among the jumbled heap

Of murky buildings.”

The poem was about how my sisters

got along while I felt left out.

For our sixth grade banquet,

we had a talent showcase and

I auditioned to read my poem.

They accepted me

and then ask if I had anything happier.

I didn’t.

But there’s something there
Hidden under dead leaves,
colored like life.
Deep reds, oranges, rich browns.

I tried to write a poem that was happy

and I was disgusted with the result.

It was fake

and plastic

and the ideas about puzzles and

enigmas I was trying to explore

were like stepping into a ten-foot maze

with only one turn.

I had lost my harmony with poetry,

and Harmony was what

Keats strived for.

Small black text on thin, frail,
yellowing paper
They were more than words.
They were fruit—red apples
that brown too quickly,
but always taste sweet.
Mangoes or peaches—some orange fruit
ripe almost to over-ripeness,

“…To Keats,

there is the belief,

repeated over and over in letters

and poetry, that there is an essential

harmony between all things,

and that the poet must continually

partake of the existence of

all other creatures—” (Coombs 46).

juice coursing down your chin
with the first bite.

Even if no one liked it—and

I was so nervous, if there was

scattered applause afterward

I didn’t notice,

I certainly don’t remember

hearing much reaction—

Alone was the poem I’d written and

I wasn’t going to write differently

just because it wasn’t popular.

Applause for a child,

a paycheck for an adult,

popularity and success

were never my goals when I wrote.

Some other time you might be annoyed,
the orange hue will stain your white shirt,
but this time you just smile, lick your lips,
wipe away the pulpy remains, and
you think,
this may be your favorite time to eat fruit.

John Keats, also called Junkets

because of his pronunciation,

struggled throughout his life.

He lost his parents when he was young,

had three siblings to care for,

and money trouble which continued

for years.

As a poet,

his work wasn’t particularly popular

or successful.

Of course, these details

are ones I didn’t know

until fairly recently.

My first memory of encountering

Keats was in high school,

when my AP English teacher

assigned a project that required

the students to find a poem

that spoke to us,

research and study it,

then find a song and

a piece of art that reflects the poem.

Lastly, we had to write a poem

inspired by our chosen subject.

I stumbled across Keats’ To Autumn.

I received a B on that project,

with its landscape painting,

“Seasons of Love” theme song

and a new poem,

inspired by Keats' description of the season,

entitled To Winter.

Only to learn now

that Keats wrote about autumn,

then worked backward to summer,

and even spring,

but did not dwell near winter often.

According to Helen Vendler,

“…it was clear to me that To Autumn ‘said’ things

by means of what I then thought of as collocation—

what Keats called (when he praised it in Milton)

‘stationing.’

Somewhat later I came to see that the autumn ode

‘said’ things also by the activities of its imagery,

by its overlapping structures,

and by its exquisite explorations

of suggestive diction,” (14).

Most of my peers would’ve been happy

with that grade,

but eight years ago,

even now,

I knew I was missing

so much of his meaning

and that my project was

a shell of analysis.

To Autumn,

one of Keats most popular poems,

if not the most popular,

was the culmination of a handful of season

and autumn-themed poems,

as well as founded on the previous odes.

Autumn’s “full ripen’d grain”

standing on the shoulders of Joy’s grape

in Ode to Melancholy.

FOUR Seasons fill the measure of the year;

There are four seasons in the mind of man:

He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear

Takes in all beauty with an easy span:

He has his Summer, when luxuriously

Spring’s honey’d cud of youthful thought he loves

To ruminate, and by such dreaming high

Is nearest unto heaven: quiet coves

His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings

He furleth close; contented so to look

On mists in idleness—to let fair things

Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook.

He has his Winter too of pale misfeature,

Or else he would forego his mortal nature.
The Human Seasons, 1820[1]

Vendler also looks at how Keats’ odes are built one upon the other, so that the imagery in an early one appears, slightly changed, in later ones, but also how, for instance, language related to the harvest and seasons occur in poetry leading up to To Autumn (10).

A portrait of John Keats painted by John Severn in 1819 (a wood print-styled version of which is on the cover of my copy of “The Selected Poetry of John Keats.”

(Many representations seem to portray Keats as sitting at a table leaning his chin on the heel of his hand. My own proclivity notwithstanding, I do wonder why nearly half of the common paintings circulated contain this same posture. Is it to strengthen the image of Keats as a Romantic, wistfully gazing out of a window at the nature outside, a bird or the changing of the seasons? Or is the artists’ simplified view of Keats, that they did not see him as much more than a Romantic poet, they couldn’t see him as doing more than that? Or maybe he was a daydreamer, and this was exactly how they often encountered him when dropping by for a visit.)

[1] From the main page of John-Keats.com. On this main page there are also links to a Keats Advent Calendar and many pictures of Keats Hampstead Home, currently unavailable because of an error with their forum.

The Stakes, of the non-Vampire-hunting Variety

“Is Criticism a true thing?” Keats asks in a marginal note in regards to Dr. Johnson’s comments on As You Like It. Over the course of months, as I became more obsessed with John Keats, his life and his poetry, I have tried to find him in my own life and writing. I’ve certainly found him in my reading, but he’s also appeared on the internet. Over a hundred years after his death, Keats’ presence is still all around us, from photos of his museum home, where you can tour the places he slept and wrote, to the YouTube phenomenon, where someone calling themselves HeavilyBreathingCat can recite “On Sitting Down to Read ‘King Lear’ Once Again” with a video of his cat lounging on a chair.

The Power of Google Compels You

With people using Keats in these ways, what meaning can people find on the internet, at least when it comes to him?

From the scholastic to the anarcho…

Resistance to Google is Futile

With a handful of seconds, a few quick, clattering taps of the keyboard, “keats” and "invisible writers” reveal entire books about Keats and his writing accessible through the internet.

As the second generation of British Romantics died or succumbed to more conservative views (being, at first, very supportive of the French Revolution of the time period), the Victorian period emerged. Despite a characterization much different from the Romantic and seemingly disconnected from the values towards nature and imagination, writers were influenced by the Keats and his contemporaries. Alfred Tennyson, according to Egendorf, was influenced by Shelley and Keats, particularly in his Arthurian medieval poetry. Keats’ writing also inspired the school of Pre-Raphaelites, who were concerned with the “links” between writing and painting (24).

And now, a simple search reveals 544 video results pop up on YouTube when one searches for “keats.”

Keats lived during a time when many of his contemporaries were sympathetic, or supportive, towards the French Revolution, while dwelling in their writing on medieval influences, as well as a desire to resist the preceding mode of classicism. In the introduction to English Romanticism, Laura Egendorf draws the contrast between the two forms of writing, illustrating how, in order to work against the ideas of classicism, Romantic writers looked to the specific and detailed, imagination over reason, and especially a celebration of nature (27-30).

Romanticism was also characterized by a preoccupation with death, the “world of dreams” and drugs. Coleridge could attest to the latter, but Keats surely could recite a few lines about the fist two. So if this where the high school students of today can find Keats? Is he hiding behind kohl-rimmed eyes and boots with straps and spikes?

A search of YouTube, a website now popular with millions for finding short videos on almost any subject, also depicts the incarnations of Keats. Older gentlemen recite odes while a seasonal landscapes, nature scenes and Greek art fade in and out. The video for one version of Ode to a Nightingale shows a few sketches of Keats. There are 529 views as of now. Another version of the same ode by a different person focuses more on brighter images such as nightingales, wine and Bacchanal scenes. This version has over one thousand views, though it strikes me as a slightly duller reading despite the more vibrant imagery. But for a 12th grade English project, a group of kids decided to showcase a biography of John Keats through the lens of a Pulp Fiction-like short film.

Ever the Question

Why?

Keats’ life was tragic—he lost his parents at a young age, consistently had trouble with money and lost relatives to tuberculosis, including his younger brother, Tom. And granted, the project was based on his life and not his poetry. But there is an image of Keats floating in the internet ether, that strikes the young as memorable, as akin to an action-hero.

Keats as James Bond, saving the damsel in distress, getting the girl, and looking good while doing it.

Keats as Die Hard John McClane, fighting until the very end.

Keats as more than another name of a dead poet that every kid reads at some point in a giant anthology.

“John Keats: Movie” and “Brokeback Keats”—the latter’s title alone playing with the connections between the Keats of the 1800s and the pop culture of today—was based on information found on Wikipedia, another popular website, this one dedicated to encyclopedic knowledge anyone can edit. The film is a thrilling suspense a la “Mission: Impossible.” We should all remember that Keats was “a poet, damn it, not a scientist.” Honestly, this was funny, and the Charlie Brown references really took it to a deeper level.

Charles Brown's House, 1818

His mother dies, and Tim Berculosis then kills his younger brother and uncle.

From this film, one is drawn into the world of Keats within the internet. YouTube has the curious ability to draw a viewer in for hours. From one piece to another, a chain link grows until the beginning is lost and one finds oneself traveling from link to link without any sense of where it’s going to end. That’s the key. It doesn’t end. And sometimes one may stumble onto a video they’ve seen already and that will lead to others they’ve never imagined.

Ode to Keats

Linked to “John Keats: The Movie” was “To Autumn,” with 3,000 plus views and a barrage of red, orange and brown autumn imagery. It was recited by Neil Conrich (apparently a very mysterious actor with no biography readily available online). There can even be found poems and videos in response to Keats, such as Glen Fitch’s “To John Keats,” a response to his “To Autumn. It’s short and sweet, and shows that even in today’s modern world, Keats inspires and influences generation upon generation of poets.

TO JOHN KEATS
By Glen Fitch

Dear priest and prophet,

cantor of sweet time,

Grand dreamer

of delicious lore and fame,

What e'er you viewed

that spirit you became

To sing its joy and sorrow

in rich rhyme.

And when the frenzy

wrought a poem sublime

Each line reveals

the soul you sought to claim.

But now unto Apollo

songs you frame.

For us your hymn

fell silent ere its prime.

But in the sacred bower

of your mind,

Before the timeless font

of pleasure-pain

Will you not say a prayer

of soft design

To make his Muses

mold me in your kind

And by your saintly chants

have me ordained,

If unsung rhymes

in Faerielande remain?

Keats, in the myriad portraits of him, always seems to be looking into the distance, out a window, at some far off tree or bird soaring further and further away.

Yet, for the students of this generation, Keats is right beside. We are staring out that same window, trying to see what he sees, or trying to find something different with the same gaze.

I wonder if he ever got bored,

Sitting for all those portraits?

Who Killed John Keats?

It is a question asked on John-Keats.com. Lord Byron claimed it was bad reviews of Keats’ work. Others claimed it was a Mr. Tim Berculosis, in retaliation for not retrieving a vaccine. It is questions such as this, according to Ed Friedlander, that creates the romantic image of this Romantic poet. He explains:

There is actually much of the modern rock-and-roll star in Keats. His lyrics make sense, he tried hard to preserve his health, and he found beauty in the simplest things rather than in drugs (which were available in his era) or wild behavior. But in giving in totally to the experiences and sensations of the moment, without reasoning everything out, Keats could have been any of a host of present-day radical rockers.

O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!
It is a "Vision in the form of Youth"
a shadow of reality to come and
this consideration has further convinced me...
that we shall enjoy ourselves here after
having what we called happiness on Earth
repeated in a finer tone and so repeated.
And yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in Sensation
rather than hunger as you do after Truth.
In a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey, Nov. 22, 1817

Friedlander adds, “If you are curious to learn more about Keats, you'll find he was tough, resilient, and likeable.”

However, Friedlander is not the only one to notice this rock star hiding beneath the veneer of 19th century garb. In “Brokeback Keats,” the original draft of the Ode to Fanny, a poem about Keats’ fiancé Fanny Brawne (Bright Star, a sonnet about her is now being made into a film) is found by Freddy Mercury of “Bohemian Rhapsody” fame. The last few minutes of the 11-minute work is the band Queen performing “Fat-Bottomed Girls.”

John Keats has even made into the blogosphere, the world of online journals and public displays of emotion, fandom and sometimes-pseudo-journalism. Quentin Crisp, in his blog “Directory of Lost Causes,” discusses his writing and influences on such in a post from July 2006, “Invisible and Dumb.”

He mentioned David Bowie, another rock star from the 1970s and 80s.

Although he doesn’t directly mention Keats, he does post photos of lifemasks Bowie made. In the comments, a reader draws the comparison between Bowie’s masks and Keats’.

It’s a simple comparison, but that Keats was drawn into a conversation about someone that initially seems so different illustrates how Keats has invaded the culture, even today.

For months, I have been reading essays and books completely unrelated to John Keats, only to stumble across a line or two that propels me back to him. He’s become that writer for me, which I couldn’t avoid if I wanted to. It’s a shame that www.keats.blogspot.com has two short posts from someone who joined then immediately switched back to Livejournal (another online journal website), leaving the possibility of a blog for Keats just a bit further away.

Life and Death, Bowie and Keats, sometimes it's so hard to tell the difference

What has been neglected in the long critical emphasis on Keats’ thoughts and feelings is (though it may seem odd to say so) a study of Keats as a poet. By this I mean the study of Keats as a maker of inexpressibly complex articulations of language in architectural form, works in which ‘the intention of making’ controls what is said, works ‘in which the play of figures contain[s] the reality of the subject’,” (Valery, The Art of Poetry, qtd in Vendler, 10).

Keats was a poet more concerned with the senses than with thought (Vendler 10). I think one reason my “happy” poem failed was because I thought about it too much. Poetry, for me, has always been an exercise in catharsis, often beginning with an image or emotion and stemming from that point. Once I tried to structure it around a thought, intentionally focusing less on the ideas and more on how to make a statement, the poem failed.

Spending most of his writing life looking towards the brightness of spring, the warmth of summer and the fullness of autumn, Keats died near the end of winter, in the later part of February 1821.

Monuments over Time...What are they to us now?

Years have passed, but he still plays a part in our lives. His home still stands,

Hampstead House, 1907 .......Hampstead House, now





and people still visit his grave.

This Grave
contains all that was mortal,
of a
Young English Poet,
who
on his Death Bed,
in the Bitterness of his heart,
at the Malicious Power of his enemies,
desired
these words to be Engraven on his Tomb Stone:
Here lies One
Whose Name was writ in Water.



And yet, all Keats wished for others to know was that “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Joseph Severn and Charles Brown chose to add all the rest.

John Keats suffered, died on February 23, 1821, and was buried on February 26. Why does it matter to me that he died five days before I was born, a hundred and sixty-three years earlier?

And yet, there’s something there which speaks to me and I find myself returning to Keats’ work repeatedly. “RIP John Keats.” People live and die. Writers are no different. And John Keats was one who lived and died long before my time.

Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

Is it that he felt his legacy was merely passing, something to come and go as swiftly as the tide or the never-to-return flow of a stream.

Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

I cannot say I agree with the sentiment. Popular or successful or not, I still want my memory to linger.

Here lies one whose name was writ in water. How fleeting these words set into stone almost two hundred years ago.

Bibliography

A Song About Myself. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=KeaMyse.xml&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=1&division=div1. University of Virginia Library. 4-23-08

City of London. http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/Corporation/leisure_heritage/libraries_archives_museums_galleries/keats_house. 3-12-08

Coombs, Heather. “Nature as Imagination.” English Romanticism. Ed. Laura Egendorf. The Greenhaven Press Companion to Literary Movements and Genres. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2001.

De Man, Paul. Ed. The Selected Poetry of John Keats. New York: Meridian Classic, 1966.

Directory of Lost Causes. “Invisible and Dumb.” http://my.opera.com/quentinscrisp/blog/show.dml/342773 July 10, 2006. Quentin Crisp. 4-13-08

Egendorf, Laura K. Ed. English Romanticism. The Greenhaven Press Companion to Literary
Movements and Genres. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2001.

Enjoying “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” by John Keats. http://www.pathguy.com/lbdsm.htm. Ed Friedlander, M.D. 4-23-08

Google Books: Writers on writing, by Robert Pack and Jay Parini. http://books.google.com/books?id=He3aRBskI_0C&pg=PA126&lpg=PA126&dq=keats+invisible+writers&source=web&ots=-5lHUCZ73N&sig=yJg2CBa5EFdGdFukfn7pew4iv6I&hl=en#PPA126,M1. 4-23-08.

IMDB: Bright Star. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0810784. The Internet Movie Database. 1990-2004. 5-5-08.

John-Keats.com. http://www.john-keats.com/ Thilo von Pape. 3-12-08

Pack, Robert. Ed. Selected Letters of John Keats. New York: Signet Classic, 1974.

Poetry Landmarks of Britain. http://more.poetrysociety.org.uk/landmark/front.php. The Poetry Society. 3-12-08

Poets.org. http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/66. The Academy of American Poets. 1997-2002. 3-12-08

Representative Poetry Online. http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poet/180.html. University of Toronto. 5-4-08

Shakespeare Geek. http://blog.shakespearegeek.com/2006/06/john-keats.html. Duane. June 26, 2006. 4-23-08

The Keats-Shelley House. http://keats-shelley-house.org/ 3-20-08

The Life and Work of John Keats. http://englishhistory.net/keats/contents.html. Marilee. March 2004. 3-12-08

Vendler, Helen. The Odes of John Keats. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.

YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/. 3-12-08.

Videos watched include:

RIP John Keats, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8CO9gkFB3U
Rap Master Johnnie Keats, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WH7h0McMCc
John Keats: The Movie, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8e_fDij2eg
Brokeback Keats, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tWs70BneIw
To John Keats: A Sonnet, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zfntjAFnIE
Ode to a Nightingale-John Keats, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lZancDgAD0
John Keats: Ode to a Nightingale, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYK7gUKxT7U

And, because I like, a direct link to RIP Keats:

Working out the kinks

I should have this up in a day or so, but then it should be ready to go. This will be an online version of an anarcho-scholastic paper I'm doing on John Keats, the Romantic poet.