I started writing this with the intent of doing an “Introduction to the Romantic Poets” – but I couldn’t do it: not because I didn’t have enough to say about the Romantic Poets; not because I was having trouble getting words on the page; not because I didn’t know enough to feel qualified. The reason I couldn’t write an “Introduction to the Romantic Poets” is far quirkier and strange than that; I have a fetish for John Keats. Everyone on LitGenius knows about it. Usually we just joke about it, but I figured it was about time I explained why I love Keats so much.
John Keats is one of the most beloved poets in the English language; but, unfortunately, I find a lot of that love comes from English scholars rather than your common reader of poetry. Keats’s “Great Odes” – Ode to Psyche, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, and To Autumn – are within the most highly regarded and loved groups of work in the entire history of poetry. Among people with a minor interest in poetry, Ode on a Grecian Urn and Ode to a Nightingale are two of an extremely small group of poems that are known by nearly everyone.
But I’m writing today to introduce the average person to my addiction – John Keats.
Grant F. Scott wrote:
“For most modern readers it is hard to see Keats’s poems for the sheen of their language. They appear too much like bright monuments in winter sun. No one, I suspect, could mistake a line like “And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep”––from The Eve of St. Agnes––for anything but poetry. Indeed, Keats has come to represent the poet of “silken Phrases, and silver sentences,” exploiting language, rhyme, and allusion in ways that terrify students but thrill the ranks of professional scholars.”
Now that’s a scary statement – and it’s completely true. Shakespeare is a name in English that is known to almost every speaker of the language; based upon the sheer amount of distinguished scholarly criticism written regarding English language authors, Keats comes second only to Shakespeare (and even that’s debatable)! Yet, the name John Keats isn’t nearly as well-known as that of William Shakespeare, and a major reason for that is because of what Grant F. Scott said: Keats’s poems “appear too much like bright monuments in winter sun” and he exploits “language, rhyme, and allusion in ways that terrify students.” In short, you can't just dive into Keats and appreciate him – he’ll scare you off and leave you as confused as a cat on hallucinogens.
The way to start with Keats is not to attempt to understand the beauty of To Autumn; the way to begin reading Keats is carefully, and hopefully, with a guide!
Back to Keats’s fame – in my opinion, it has bloomed into a gorgeous rose garden: for a scholar, it’s beautiful, but for a beginner who wants to learn about Keats, there are too many devious thorns. Essentially, the world of English academia loves Keats so much that we’ve collected pretty much every word he ever wrote (the only exceptions are the words he wrote that we can’t find copies of). Because of this, you’ll find stuff like “Give me women, wine, and snuff” if you try to venture into the world of Keats alone. That “poem,” while it might be the historic predecessor to some famous rap songs, is actually just something that Keats scribbled on the cover of his friend's lecture notebook when he was nineteen. I provide that as an example of the fervor that surrounds Keats – we’ve collected the stuff he scribbled on his friends' notebooks and presented it in books of his collected poetry (imagine if everything you scribbled or typed anywhere after you turned about eighteen was recorded and examined and you’ll see my point).
So, let me be your guide to Keats’s rose garden and help you avoid the brambles while guiding you to one of the first beautiful flowers, “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer”:
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demense;
Yet did I never breath its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific –– and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise ––
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
John Keats’s sonnet “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” was assigned to me one week in my Honors Poetry class when I became an English major in university. We were given a poem to write on every week and only required to write a paragraph in response –– when I sat down to write about “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” I didn’t see what was special about it and had no idea why my professor was so in love with Keats.
When I turned in my response, it was over four pages long.
I’ve tried to highlight (briefly) the things that blow my mind about the sonnet in my annotations above. We, of course, have an annotated version on Genius, but I have my caveats about it. In fact, when PoetryGenius was first created, I wrote a pretty scathing forum post about why having poetry on the site was a terrible idea. Obviously, I changed my mind, but a lot of my initial reluctance was due to my love for Keats and the fact we just can’t go deep enough in our annotations to fully explain the beauty of his poems without making our annotations pure nerdspeak that the average user wouldn’t understand at all.
I’m trying to fix that problem here. Accessibility is a key factor to Genius and, as much as I’d like to, writing annotations that explained Keats’s poetry to the degree I’d be satisfied with is just impractical. My paper on La Belle Dame sans Merci is eleven pages long and I couldn’t even explain everything I wanted to talk about there. So providing primers to John Keats on Genius is the only thing I can think of that can possibly help our users understand why he was considered a true genius.
To make this article brief enough that someone will read it, I just want to talk about one more sonnet for now.
“On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again”:
O golden-tongued Romance, with serene lute!
Fair plumèd Siren! Queen of far-away,
Leave melodizing on this wintry day,
Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute.
Adieu! for, once again, the fierce dispute
Betwixt damnation and impassioned clay
Must I burn through; once more humbly assay
The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearean fruit.
Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,
Begetters of our deep eternal theme,
When through the old oak forest I am gone,
Let me not wander in a barren dream,
But when I am consumèd in the fire,
Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.
Again, I’ve annotated some of my favorite things about the poem.
This isn’t nearly enough to properly introduce you to the beauty of John Keats’s poetry, but I hope I’ve kindled some interest in a few of those who read this. I’m always happy to talk about Keats and I’m one of the contacts for anything that falls under the Romanticism tag so feel free to message me if you have any questions about him.
To end, a quote from one of Keats’s letters (which deserve an introduction article dedicated solely to them, for the record):
“I always made an awkward bow.”
