The first important poem to which Keats sets his hand after finishing
"Endymion" was "Isabella, or The Pot of Basil." This was completed by
April 27, 1818, the same month in which "Endymion" was published.
Hamilton Reynolds had suggested the project of producing a volume of
tales in verse, founded upon stories in Boccaccio's "Decameron"; some of
the tales would have been executed by Reynolds himself, who did in fact
produce on this plan the two poems named collectively "The Garden of
Florence." As it turned out, however, Keats's tale appeared in a volume
of his own, 1820, and Reynolds's two came out independently in the
succeeding year.
"The Eve of St. Agnes" was written in the winter beginning the year
1819. Then came "Hyperion," of which two versions remain, both
fragmentary. The first version (begun perhaps as early as October or
September 1818), the only one which Keats himself published, is in all
respects by far the better. He was much under the spell of Milton while
he wrote it; and finally he gave it up in September 1819, declaring that
"there were too many Miltonic inversions in it." He went so far as to
say in a letter written in the same month that "the 'Paradise Lost,'
though so fine in itself, is a corruption of our language--a northern
dialect accommodating itself to Greek and Latin inversions and
intonations." "Hyperion" was included in Keats's third volume at the
request of the publishers, contrary to the author's own preference. One
may readily infer that it was to "Hyperion" that he referred when, in
the preface to "Endymion," he spoke of returning to Grecian mythology
for another subject: the full length of the poem was to have been ten
books.
"Lamia" was the last poem of considerable length which Keats brought to
completion and published. It seems to have been begun towards the summer
of 1819, and was written with great care, after a heedful study of
Dryden's methods of composition. On September 18, 1819, Keats wrote: "I
am certain there is that sort of fire in it which must take hold of
people in some way, give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensations."
The subject was taken from Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," in which
there is a reference to the "Life of Apollonius" by Philostratus as the
original source of the legend.
The volume--entitled "Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and other
Poems"--came out towards the beginning of July 1820, when the malady of
Keats had reached an advanced and alarming stage. At the beginning of
September Keats wrote to Brown--"The sale of my book is very slow,
though it has been very highly rated." I am not aware that there is any
other record to show how far the publication may ultimately have
approached towards becoming a commercial success; nor indeed would it be
altogether easy to define the date at which Keats became a recognized
and uncontested poet of high rank, and his works a solid property. His
early death, at the beginning of 1821, must have formed a
turning-point--not to speak of the favourable notice of "Endymion," and
subordinately of the "Lamia" volume, which appeared in _The Edinburgh
Review_, Jeffrey being the critic, in August 1820. Perhaps Jeffrey's
praise may have facilitated an arrangement which Keats made in September
1820--the sale of the copyright of "Endymion" to Messrs. Taylor and
Hessey for L100; no second edition of the poem appeared, however, while
he was alive. I should presume that, within five or six years after
Keats's decease, ridicule and rancour were already much in the minority;
and that, by some such date as 1835 to 1840, they had finally "hidden
their diminished heads," living only, with too persistent a life, in the
retributive memory of men.
Some of the shorter poems in the "Lamia" volume must receive brief
mention here. The "Ode to Psyche" was written in February 1819, and was
termed by Keats the first poem with which he had taken pains--"I have
for the most part dashed off my lines in a hurry." "To Autumn," the "Ode
on Melancholy," and the "Ode on a Grecian Urn," succeeded. The "Ode to a
Nightingale" was composed at Hampstead in the spring of 1819 _after
breakfast_, forming two or three hours' work: thus we see that the
nocturnal imagery of the ode was a general or a particular reminiscence,
not actual to the very moment of composition. This poem and the "Ode on
a Grecian Urn" were recited by Keats to Haydon in a chaunting tone in
Kilburn meadows, and were published in the serial entitled "Annals of
the Fine Arts." The urn thus immortalized may probably be one preserved
in the garden of Holland House.
With the "Lamia" volume we have come to the close of what Keats
published during his lifetime. Something remains to be said of other
writings of his--almost all of them earlier in date than the publication
of that volume--which remained imprinted or uncollected at the time of
his death.
In February 1818 Keats, Leigh Hunt, and Shelley, undertook to write a
sonnet each upon the river Nile. In order of merit, the three sonnets
are the reverse of what one might have been willing to forecast. I at
least am clearly of opinion that Hunt's sonnet is the best (though with
a weak ending), Keats's the second, and Shelley's a decidedly bad third.
The leading thought in each sonnet is characteristic of its author.
Keats adheres to the simple natural facts of the case, while Hunt and
Shelley turn the Nile into a moral or intellectual symbol. Keats says
essentially that to associate the Nile with ideas of antique desolation
is but a delusion of ignorance, for this river is really rich and fresh
like others. Hunt makes the Egyptian stream an emblem of history tending
towards the progress of the individual and the race; while Shelley reads
into the Nile a lesson of the good and the evil inhering in knowledge.
"The Eve of St. Mark"--a fragment which very few of Keats's completed
poems can rival in point of artist-like feeling and writing--belongs to
the years 1818-9. I find nothing in print to account for his leaving it
unfinished.
In May 1819 Keats had an idea of inventing a new structure of
sonnet-rhyme; and he sent to his brother and sister-in-law a sonnet
composed accordingly, beginning--
"If by dull rhymes our English must be chained."
He wrote: "I have been endeavouring to discover a better sonnet-stanza
than we have. The legitimate does not suit the language well, from the
pouncing rhymes. The other appears too elegiac, and the couplet at the
end of it has seldom a pleasing effect. I do not pretend to have
succeeded." Keats's experiment reads agreeably. It comprises five rhymes
altogether; the first rhyme being repeated thrice at arbitrary
intervals; and the last rhyme twice in lines twelve and fourteen.
The tragedy of "Otho the Great" was written by Keats (as already
referred to) in July and August 1819, in co-operation with Armitage
Brown. The diction of the play is, it would appear, Keats's entirely;
whereas the invention and development of plot in the first four acts is
wholly due to Brown. The two friends sat together; Brown described each
successive scene, and Keats turned it into verse, without troubling his
head as to the subject-matter for the scene next ensuing. When it came
to the fifth act, however, Keats inquired what would be the conclusion
of the play; and, not being satisfied with Brown's project which he
deemed too humorous and too melodramatic, he both invented and wrote a
fifth act for himself. He felt sure that "Otho the Great" was "a
tolerable tragedy," and set his heart upon getting it acted--Kean was
well inclined to take the principal character, Prince Ludolph; and it
became his greatest ambition to write fine plays. "Otho" was in fact
accepted for Drury Lane Theatre, on the offer of Brown, who left Keats's
authorship in the background; but, as both the writers were impatient of
delay, Brown, in February 1820, took away the MS., and Covent Garden
Theatre was thought of instead--without any practical result. As soon as
"Otho" was finished, Brown suggested King Stephen as the subject of
another drama; and Keats, without any further collaboration from his
friend, composed the few scenes of it which remain. "One of my
ambitions" (writes Keats to Bailey in August 1819), "is to make as great
a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has done in acting."
The ballad "La Belle Dame sans Merci," than which Keats did nothing more
thrilling or more perfect, may perhaps have been written in the earlier
half of 1819; it was published in 1820, in Hunt's _Indicator_ for May
10th, under the signature "Caviare"; the same signature which was
adopted for the sonnet, "A dream, after reading Dante's episode of Paolo
and Francesca." Keats may probably have meant to imply, in some
bitterness of spirit, that his poems were "caviare to the general." The
title of this ballad was suggested to Keats by seeing it at the head of
a translation from Alain Chartier in a copy of Chaucer. As to the
"Dream" sonnet he wrote in April 1819:--
"The 5th canto of Dante pleases me more, and more; it is that one
in which he meets with Paulo and Francesca. I had passed many
days in rather a low state of mind, and in the midst of them I
dreamt of being in that region of Hell. The dream was one of the
most delightful enjoyments I ever had in my life. I floated about
the wheeling atmosphere, as it is described, with a beautiful
figure, to whose lips mine were joined, it seemed for an age; and
in the midst of all this cold and darkness I was warm.
Ever-flowery tree-tops sprang up, and we rested on them,
sometimes with the lightness of a cloud, till the wind blew us
away again. I tried a sonnet on it; there are fourteen lines in
it, but nothing of what I felt. Oh that I could dream it every
night!"
The last long work which Keats undertook, and he wrote it with extreme
facility, was "The Cap and Bells; or The Jealousies, a Fairy Tale," in
the Spenserian stanza. What remains is probably far less than Keats
intended the tale to amount to, but it is enough to enable us to
pronounce upon its merits. The poem was begun soon after Keats's first
attack of blood-spitting in February 1820. It seems singular that under
such depressing conditions he should have written in so frivolous and
jaunty a spirit, and provoking that his last long work (the last, that
is, if we except the recast of "Hyperion") should be about the most
valueless which he produced, at any date after commencing upon
"Endymion." This poem has been said to be written in the spirit of
Ariosto; a statement which, in justice to the brilliant Italian, cannot
be admitted. It may well be, however, as Lord Houghton suggests, that
the general notion was suggested by Brown, who had translated the first
five cantos (not indeed of Ariosto, but) of the "Orlando Innamorato" of
Bojardo. "The Cap and Bells" appears to be destitute of distinct plan,
though some sort of satirical allusion to the marital and extra-marital
exploits of George IV. is traceable in it; meagre and purposeless in
invention; a poor farrago of pumped-up and straggling jocosity. Perhaps
a hearty laugh has never been got out of it; although there are points
here and there at which a faint snigger may be permissible, and the
concluding portion improves somewhat. Keats seems to have intended to
publish it under a pseudonym, Lucy Vaughan Lloyd; and Hunt gave, in _The
Indicator_ of August 23, 1820, some taste of its quality, possibly
meaning to print more of it anon.
The last verses which Keats ever wrote formed the sonnet here ensuing.
He composed this late in September 1820, after landing on the
Dorsetshire coast, probably near Lulworth, and returning to the ship
which bore him to his doom in Italy; and he wrote it down on a blank
page in Shakespeare's Poems, facing "A Lover's Complaint."
"Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art;
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient sleepless eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors:--
No, yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest;
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death."
Of poetic projects which remained unfulfilled when Keats died we
hear--leaving out of count the works which he had begun and left
uncompleted--of only one. During his voyage to Naples he often spoke of
wishing to write the story of Sabrina, as indicated in Milton's "Comus,"
connecting it with some points in English history and character.
In prose--apart from his letters, which are noticeably various in mood,
matter, and manner, and contain many admirable things--Keats wrote
extremely little. In a weekly paper with which Reynolds was connected,
_The Champion_, December 1817, he published two articles on "Kean as a
Shakespearean Actor:" they are not remarkable. With the above-named
articles are now associated some "Notes on Shakespeare," not written
with a view to publication; these appear to me somewhat strained and
bloated. There are also some "Notes on Milton's 'Paradise Lost.'" On
September 22, 1819, Keats addressed to Mr. Dilke a letter, which however
does not appear to have been actually sent off. As it shows a definite
intention of writing in prose for regular publication and for an income,
a few sentences are worth quoting.
"It concerns a resolution I have taken to endeavour to acquire
something by temporary writing in periodical works. You must
agree with me how unwise it is to keep feeding upon hopes which,
depending so much on the state of temper and imagination, appear
gloomy or bright, near or afar off, just as it happens.... You
may say I want tact; that is easily acquired.... I should, a year
or two ago, have spoken my mind on every subject with the utmost
simplicity. I hope I have learned a little better, and am
confident I shall be able to cheat as well as any literary Jew of
the market, and shine up an article on anything without much
knowledge of the subject--aye, like an orange. I would willingly
have recourse to other means. I cannot; I am fit for nothing but
literature.... Notwithstanding my 'aristocratic' temper, I cannot
help being very much pleased with the present public proceedings.
I hope sincerely I shall be able to put a mite of help to the
liberal side of the question before I die."
On the following day Keats wrote to Brown on the same subject--
"I will write on the liberal side of the question for whoever
will pay me. I have not known yet what it is to be diligent. I
purpose living in town in a cheap lodging, and endeavouring, for
a beginning, to get the theatricals of some paper.... I shall
apply to Hazlitt, who knows the market as well as any one, for
something to bring me in a few pounds as soon as possible. I
shall not suffer my pride to hinder me. The whisper may go
round--I shall not hear it. If I can get an article in _The
Edinburgh_, I will. One must not be delicate."
In pursuance of this plan, Keats did, for a few days in October, take a
lodging in Westminster. He then reverted to Hampstead, and finally the
scheme came to nothing, principally perhaps because his fatal illness
began, and everything had to be given up which was not directly
controlled by considerations of health.