Keats the Poet

Geoffrey Tillotson said of Middlemarch that you could overrate it only "by saying that it was easily the best of the half-dozen best novels in the world." In biography, the same can be said of Walter Jackson's John Keats.

Bate'sKeats culminates twenty-five years of loving scholarship, beginning with his undergraduate thesis at Harvard. It represents a classic synthesis of the two major styles of modern biography. With few exceptions, scholarly biography in the twentieth century has been characterized either by massive detail (what Sinclair Lewis, for example, had for breakfast) or by brisk, selective interpretation (Andrew Turnbull's fine F. Scott Fitzgerald). In reconciling the two extremes, Professor Bate has not only produced a great biography, he has also--more importantly--provided a new definition, by example, of the profounder uses of scholarship.

Keats's life, already tre subject of four major studies, holds a peculiar fascination for both the general reader and the aspiring writer. For the first there is grand, poignant drama in the tragic story of the neglected genius, his famous love affair with Fanny Brawne, and his death of consumption at twenty-five. Even more, there is the charm of the man himself as be appears in his poems and letters and his friends' reminiscences--warm, sensitive and noble, the most Shakespearean of modern poets.

Writers, however, have a larger interest in Keats. "It is a commonplace," Bate writes, that poetry and indeed all the arts have seemed to become increasingly specialized throughout the last two hundred and fifty years, and especially during the twentieth century. We face even more directly the problem that was widely discussed throughout the fifty years before Keats was born and also throughout his lifetime: where are the Homers and Shakespeares, the 'greater genres'--the epic and dramatic tragedy--or at least reasonable equivalents?

The problem Keats faced was, how to achieve originality in the face of tradition? How does literature use literature? And Keats, believes Bate, "was somehow able, after the age of twenty-two, to confront this dilemma, and to trancend it..."

Bate does justice to both dramas--the life of Keats and the life of his mind. Using the most recent discoveries in the manuscripts of the "Keats Circle" as well as older criticism and interpretation, he succeeds in drawing remarkably close to the London Keats must have known in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. By skillful, imaginative use of sources, he lifts the dullness from detail and adds a charm of his own: "On February 9, which was a fair warm day, [Keats] took a short walk in the garden, but he seems to have remained indoors the rest of the month, spending much time in bed." And Bate treats the familiar questions of Keats scholarship--his medical history, his finances, the effect of the Endymion reviews--with an informed common sense that never collapses into pedantry. Even his analyses of the poetry, although rigorously technical, provoke the most inattentive reader to a new understanding of the great Odes (particularly the "Ode to a Nightingale") and the epic fragments.

Finally, Bate writes beautifully, and thereby reduces the scope and diversity of his subject to the complicated clarity of a fine intelligence. His style, in fact, suggests nothing so much as that of George Eliot, wise and quietly affectionate.

In sad contrast to the accuracy and wisdom of Bate's book stands Aileen Ward's John Keats: The Making of a Poet. Miss Ward's book was published barely a week before Bate's and, surprisingly, neither author was aware of the other's project. Not so surprising actually, since one biography is a masterful, magnificent study, and the other is an over-written attempt at literary psychoanalysis.

The first problem, I think, is that Miss Ward is a woman. She insists on calling Keats a "lad," she has terrible chapter titles like "Soundings and Quicksands." Rather than pay attention to the sources, she habitually imagines what Keats "must have felt." Bate, when he has no evidence for someone's state of mind, says so; Miss Ward blends speculation with fact to suit herself.

But more offensive than the looseness of her scholarship and style is her psychoanalytic approach to literature. In Miss Ward's hands, the dubious tool of Freudian literary analysis becomes simply gossip. "Just as he lost his fatrer," she writes, "at the age when he needed him most keenly, he found and then lost his mother again at the time of his sexual reawakening." (Keats was fifteen then: sexual reawakening?) Distasteful as that sort of thing is when it concerns Keats's personal life, it recovers at least to the level of patent silliness where literature is involved. "Though 'Calidore' (one of Keats's earliest poems) is a fantasy of rebirth, of emergence into a masculine world, not of mere retreat as was the 'Imitation of Spenser' (Keats's first poem), it shows Keats still closely tied to half remembered early experience, not yet ready for the full freedom of mature creation." Bate, on the other hand, treats it as a poem, not a sympton.

Bate, in fact, deals with the same questions Keats did. The intellectual specialization Bate mentions in his Preface applies to critics as well as to artists, and Bate's problem is, how does scholarship use scholarship? Howard Mumford Jones, on his retirement, lay down an eloquent answer:

However professionally exciting it may be to hunt down water symbols in Poe, or Proust, or Pope, the humanist cannot forget that his primary responsibility is to the national culture, not to the Modern Language Association, and that oncoming generations, through they should be generously encouraged to believe that beauty is its own excuse for being, must also be strictly taught the changeless meaning of the three most powerful words in any dialect--justice, virtue, and love; concepts that arise out of history in spite of the fact that, or because, history too frequently denies them. The imperative task of humans teaching is, interpreting history, to lead men to ponder upon and accept the essentiality of these three words.

This is the character of Bate's work. In the past seventy-five or one hundred years, professional learning has gathered up and arranged the facts for much of the humane discipline. The scholar too often finds himself able only to rehash old stories or, like Miss Ward, to go dangerously far out on a logical limb; rarely can be relate his learning to the constant problems of man-kind. For all its erudition and its technicality, all its grace and intelligence, the quality most to be valued in John Keats is that as biography it can, in Johnson's words, be "put to use." John Keats can be used by writer and critic, scholar and interested reader--used as a fascinating guide to literature and to a man of literary genius. It demonstrates that no field of study, when well loved and well understood, can be exhausted. One would almost as soon have written Bate's book as Keats's poetry.