JOHN KEATS (1795-1821) exemplifies the difference between the past and
yesterday. Wordsworth and Coleridge are in the past. Even Browning, who came
later and who in so many ways was a prototype of what we call the modern, is
still in the past. But Keats, like Byron, is just yesterday. Every modern
poet is obliged to have a view on Keats, as if he were part of the living
competition.
A searching critique of Keats could be built up just from what he wrote about
himself, especially in his Letters, collected into a book that goes to the
centre of the poetic life. Keats’s observation on the unnecessarily high
quality of Shakespeare’s “bye-writing” is an example of how the young writer
could bring to the examination of language the same analytical intensity
with which he examined the world. It was a quality he shared with Pushkin:
their lives overlapped, but they didn’t know about each other. They might,
however, have shared the one mind when it came to precocity of technique;
and with both it is necessary to remember that they died at the beginning of
their careers, not at the end.
The forbearance that we bring to Shelley; the astonishment that we bring to
Büchner and Radiguet; the sense of being robbed by fate that we bring to
Masaccio and Bizet; we must bring all these things to Keats, or miss the
full point about the arbitrary fate that leaves us thinking of him as a
promise only partially fulfilled. We should also remember that Keats was
trained in medicine at a time when medicine could not yet cure tuberculosis:
he lived and died, that is, in a time when it was normal for talent to be
killed at random. In the modern age we don’t regard that as normal, even
when it is common. Hence our outrage when it happens, and the permanent
indignation with which we find it so much harder to come to terms than our
ancestors did with mere regret.
“Nothing is finer for the purposes of great productions than a very gradual
ripening of the intellectual powers.” Keats to his brother, January
23, 1818
Coming from Keats, the remark was either generous or nervous. On any objective
estimate, he was a prodigy: and a prodigy not just on the level of raw
verbal talent, but in the breadth and reasonableness of his mind. Given all
the qualities at a young age, it would have been large of Keats to envy the
plodders who acquire them, if at all, only over time. Or it would have been
large of him had he known how blessed he was. But perhaps he thought he
wasn’t, in which case he was being jumpy. We tend to think he was jumpy,
because we tend to believe Byron had something when he mocked Keats for
letting bad reviews get to him: “the mind, that very fiery particle . . .
snuffed out by an article.”
But nobody who lacked a solid inner artistic confidence could have written the
Odes. When I was first in London, a fair copy in Keats’s best hand of the Ode
to a Nightingale was on display in a glass cabinet in his house. His best
hand was a thing of sculptural beauty. Though the ink looked barely dry, the
ode might as well have been chiselled into a slab of marble. Lack of
confidence was not his problem. He would just have liked to live, thrive and
grow wise. There is no good reason to believe that he would not have gone on
developing: there are reasons, but they are all bad.
Kingsley Amis said in an essay that no English reader could know much about
poetry who did not think at some time in his life that Keats, because of the
initial impact of his verbal music, was the greatest poet in English after
Shakespeare. But Amis definitely meant that an enthusiasm for Keats was a
callow enthusiasm, because the poetry was callow poetry.
Even if Amis was right, it is hard to see why Keats’s poetry, had he lived,
should not have grown more mature. Keats might have had everything, but he
still needed time. He knew that within himself. Only 26 years old, he died
knowing it, and should surely be granted the validity of his own insight.
Degas said he was more interested in talent at 40 than in talent at 20. We
think the remark good because of our general conviction that anyone who
credits himself with a vocation should prove it by staying the course.
Keats’s remark fits into that view, so it, too, wins our approval. But in
fairness we should not forget the artists who reached such an intensity and
complication of achievement at an early age that we can think of them as
fulfilled even if they died young. In music, for example, Mozart and Chopin
were old stagers compared with Schubert and Bellini, dead at 31 and 33,
respectively.
The question is whether Keats, had he lived, would have gone no further.
Surely our only reason for entertaining that notion is that he was so very,
very good, and we find it uncomfortable to contemplate how rich his career
might have been had he been allowed to live it through. It might have
realigned the whole history of English literature by giving it a second
apex.
There is also the consideration that when we go back even so short a distance
as to the early 19th century we have already moved out of our time, the time
of arbitrary premature death from politics, and entered something even more
frightening by our standards, the time of arbitrary premature death from
disease.
We need to cultivate a feeling for the suddenness and randomness of God’s
wrath, because it is almost certainly true that the urge of genius towards
artistic coherence was in reaction to exactly that. With Keats, though the
age of preventive medicine was arriving – as a physician, he would have been
part of it – we are still in that old continuity. When we see, as his powers
of evocation make us bound to see, the mental picture of his nymph’s filmy
clothes sliding down her body on the eve of St Agnes, we are seeing the
living body with such intensity because of the intensity with which he saw
dead bodies in the dissecting room. The dark knowledge behind his light
moments was once the constant background radiation behind all creative life.
Many poets before Keats had caught his tone of realism, but he sustained it,
and one of the most remarkable of his many precocities is that he
intensified it, all the way to the end. The end came too soon and much of
his realism was veiled in romance, but underneath the romance he saw things
as they were, and wrote them down as if to record the texture of life were
his deepest compulsion.
He probably felt the same way about dying, but he could no longer lift his
pen.
Watch
exclusive films of Clive James on great modern figures
CULTURAL AMNESIA: NOTES IN THE MARGIN OF MY TIME by Clive James
Picador, £25; 896pp
Buy
the book here for the offer price of £23 (free p&p)
