The real John Keats

Jonathan Bate

What was he really like? When, and under the influence of what shaping forces, did he become a great poet? Any literary biographer who can answer those two questions will have achieved the holy grail of Life-writing.

The second will always be a matter of literary judgement, but the first becomes a great deal easier to explore when there is a cache of letters, diaries and intimate recollections. One of the defining features of the Romantic era is that poets started revealing their inner selves in prose – Coleridge’s and Shelley’s notebooks, Byron’s and Clare’s journals, and, above all, Keats’s incomparable letters. At the same time, the families and friends of poets began thinking it worthwhile to write about them: Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, Crabb Robinson’s diaries, Charles Lamb’s letters, Hazlitt’s essays, the many records of Byron’s table talk, the memoirs of Keats by his friends. To read De Quincey’s collected essays on the Lake Poets or Trelawny’s Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron is to feel that you are in the immediate company of genius.

The desire to revive this sensation, along with the autobiographical nature of their poetry, is why the Romantics have long held Most Favoured status among literary biographers.

We are approaching the fiftieth anniversary of the annus mirabilis in Keats biography: 1963 saw the publication of both John Keats by Walter Jackson Bate and John Keats: The making of a poet by Aileen Ward. Rereading them after working through the latest clutch of biographies, I am amazed at how well they have stood the test of time. Fifty years on, we have a few more facts and some telling new emphases, but no one has surpassed Bate (no relation) and Ward in the answering of those key questions about personality and development.

Bate remains pre-eminent on poetic technique, Ward for psychological acuity.

It was in the Romantic period that two roads diverged in the wood of literary Life-writing. Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791) had no truck with the idea that biography has a duty to be comprehensive.

Boswell only knew Johnson for the last twenty-one years of the great man’s long life, so on the principle that one writes best about what one knows well, his Life was heavily skewed to the later years. Equally, Boswell took the view that the biographer’s duty was not so much to deliver all the facts as to bring the character of the subject alive by narrating a series of vivid scenes.

This, of course, worked wonderfully because Johnson was at his most brilliant in the art of table talk. The silent work of thinking, reading, writing and revising that fills the days of most writing lives is far less amenable to Boswellian treatment.

William Hayley’s Life of Cowper (1803) accordingly offered an alternative model, proposing that letters are the richest resource for the literary Life-writer. And in the case of a quiet, introspective poet such as Cowper, he was right.

Thus the two roads diverged. If you believe that a writer’s inner life is best revealed through small details closely observed by friends (why did Dr Johnson keep his orange peelings?), then you should follow the Boswellian path. If you prefer a comprehensive, panoramic and more objectively arranged scene, then you will follow Hayley and begin with the chronological arrangement of your subject’s personal correspondence.

After Keats’s premature death, there were a number of candidates for the role of his Boswell or his Hayley. His early companion Charles Cowden Clarke had valuable reminiscences. His publisher John Taylor announced a forthcoming Life, while his lawyer friend J. H. Reynolds wanted to be asked to write one. And there were two surrogate brothers well fitted to the task: Charles Brown, who had walked with him to Scotland (as Boswell had with Johnson), and Joseph Severn, who had been by his deathbed. Leigh Hunt, a fraternal poetic inspiration, was also in the frame. At the same time, if there was to be a proper gathering of correspondence on the Hayley model, it would be necessary to work with Keats’s surviving brother, George, resident in America and in possession of the most important cache of letters.

Taylor backed away from the task. Cowden Clarke and Leigh Hunt contented themselves with brief personal reminiscences.

Severn took the view that Brown was the only man for the job. But the memory was so raw, and the anger fostered by the belief that Keats was killed by his critics so intense, that Brown stalled for many years. He also believed that George Keats had deprived John of his inheritance, so there was no cooperation over the letters.

In George Keats of Kentucky, Lawrence Crutcher, a descendant, sets out to vindicate George from the accusation of financial double-dealing. The matter is extremely convoluted, involving dealings with the tea-broker Richard Abbey who had become guardian to the Keats children when they were orphaned, a long delay in Chancery as a result of a dodgy claim on poor Tom Keats’s estate by an aunt called Margaret Jennings, George Keats’s own precarious finances in the aftermath of losing all his money in a failed steamboat venture with John James Audubon, and much more. Crutcher concludes that “Brown thought George took £170 of Tom’s inheritance from John and probably another £100 as well, not knowing that it was simply a brotherly payback of cash loans that happened to be funded by John’s share of Tom’s estate”. But brotherly paybacks are never entirely simple, and there is a good deal of exasperation as well as deep love in John’s letters to George.

The frontier life of the “Cockney Pioneers” George and Georgiana Keats is vividly evoked in Denise Gigante’s beautifully written The Keats Brothers. She offers many exquisite vignettes, none more evocative than a picture of them at the time of Tom Keats’s death. They are in a Kentucky log cabin with Audubon, a wild turkey nesting on the roof, a household of children and an eccentric pet swan called Trumpeter to keep them company, while brother John is alone with his grief back in England.

But, for all Crutcher’s special pleading and Gigante’s even-handedness, George remains the chancer, whereas John’s generosity knows no bounds. In the autumn of 1819, at the very moment when his poetry was soaring to its highest pitch (“To Autumn”, “The Fall of Hyperion”), he heard the news of George’s financial ruin and immediately grounded himself, vowing to become a jobbing journalist or even to get a job with Abbey as a teabroker’s assistant, in order to help the family in Kentucky.

- The Times Literary Supplement