Page 105 - DENG203_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_IV

Elective English—IV

Notes February 1820, “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 remember’d.”
Keats’s capability and talent was acknowledged by numerous significant contemporary allies
such as Hunt and Shelley. His followers praised him for thinking “on his pulses”, for having
established a style which was more gorgeous in its effects, more heavily loaded with sensualities,
more voluptuously alive than any poet who had come before him: ‘loading every rift with ore’.
Shelley often corresponded with Keats in Rome, and openly stated that Keats’s death had been
brought on by unfavourable reviews in the Quarterly Review. Seven weeks after the funeral he
wrote Adonaïs, a depressed elegy, stating that Keats’ early death was a public and personal
ragedy:

The loveliest and the last,
The bloom, whose petals nipped before they blew
Died on the promise of the fruit.
Even though Keats wrote that “if poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had
better not come at all”, poetry was not easy to him, his work the result of a thoughtful and
continued classical self-education. He may have had an innate poetic sensibility but his initial
works were clearly those of a young man learning his craft. His initial attempts at verse were
usually unclear, lazily narcotic and lacking clarity. His poetic sense was constructed on the
conventional tastes of his friend Charles Cowden Clarke, who first introduced him to the
classics, and also came from the predilections of Hunt’s Examiner, which Keats read as a boy.
Hunt rejected the Augustan or ‘French’ school, dominated by Pope, and attacked the earlier
Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, now in their forties, as
vague, unsophisticated and crude writers. Actually, during Keats’s few years as a published
poet, the reputation of the older Romantic school was at its lowest ebb. Keats echoed these
sentiments in his work, categorising himself with a ‘new school’ for a time, rather separating
him from Coleridge, Wordsworth and Byron and providing the basis from the scathing attacks
from Blackwoods and The Quarterly.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
First stanza of “To Autumn”,
September 1819

By the time of his death, John Keats had been linked to the faults of both old and new schools: the
insignificance of the first wave Romantics and the unschooled affectation of Hunt’s “Cockney
School”. Keats’s posthumous reputation mixed the reviewers’ caricature of the simple-minded
bumbler with the appearance of the hyper-sensitive genius killed by high feeling, which Shelley
later showed.
The Victorian sense of poetry as the work luxuriant fancy and indulgence offered a scheme into
which Keats was posthumously fixed. Marked as the standard bearer of sensory writing, Keats

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