John Keats: Places, patterns, and poetical purposes

well can I add my welcome to what is now a really special occasion you know annual academic year the the joint lecture co-hosted with the pathi Greece I've just realized I'm almost at the end of my fifth year so this must be my fifth if I can count but of course we host them ultimately so it moves from a potted grease Hall to to this Chapel I'm just going to say a few words and I'm afraid most of you in the audience will know this but Keats himself of course born in 1795 he had already undertaken a five-year apprenticeship to an apothecary in North London and was intending on a career in medicine when he registered aged 19 so he he started as an apothecary when he was very young but at the age of 19 he registered as a student dresser at guys in October 1815 and I suspect we'll hear more about that in the lecture the Keats Memorial Lecture was created in 1969 to recognize the life and poetical works of the pote to me one of the greatest poets ever to write in English his output wasn't enormous but when you think of the great poems that you know by heart quite a number of by him so I think you can all do arithmetic and we'll have worked out that tonight tonight's talk marks the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the lecture and we are absolutely delighted to be hosting it here at Kings as I've already said the lecture was set up jointly by the Worshipful Society of apothecaries the Royal College of Surgeons of England and guards Hospital Medical School and it rotates now biannually between the society and Kings for those of you who neuter Kings Kings been the successor institution to the United medical schools of guidance and Thomas's and King's College medical school I'd like to extend a special welcome to a an old colleague professor Martin Rosa master of the Worshipful Society of apothecaries and an old friend Michael Fardeen who is now the senior warden welcome to you both I'd also like to acknowledge our own professor brian horwitz for his work in ensuring that the lecturer runs smoothly and I think Brian everything associated with it the roll call of Keith's Memorial lecturers is incredibly distinguished and tonight's speaker is no exception so a few words about Nicholas Rowe he is a literary scholar of renown of romanticist culture and an acclaimed biographer of the pote he is professor of English Literature at the University of said Andrews a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the British Academy Nicholas Rowe is chairman of the Keats foundation and a trustee of the Wordsworth trust he has published several acclaimed books on Keats including John Keats and the culture of descent John Keats a new life and he has a particular interest I think this will be of interest to many of us here and the poets early education and his experiences as a surgical dresser here at guys he has collected studies in the edited volume of John Keats and the medical imagination which arose from a 2-day scholarly symposium he organized it guys and I had the opportunity to read some of his work before this lecture and I think to those of us with a poetical and a medical background it is of incredible interest tonight's talk which I've been advertently started will be taught will be entitled their John Keats places patterns and poetical purposes after his talk I'll return to the rostrum because he's agreed to take questions for fifteen to twenty minutes and then for those of you who can join us we'll have a reception so please welcome Nicholas Rowe our eminent speaker for the 50th Keats lecture [Music] thank you very much indeed principal and I'm grateful to the West Reports has a worshipful Society of apothecaries at the King's College for inviting me to present this 50th Keats memorial lecture and delighted and honored to be here I know guys Hospital and it's keeps associations of course but I've never been in the chapel so it's a particular delight to be able to speak here this evening my title is John Keats places patterns and poetical purposes and I'm beginning with an anecdote that dates from I think late 1816 John Keats once postponed a meeting with the painter Joseph seven explaining that I particularly want to look into some beautiful scenery for poetical purposes Keats was heading out of town getting away on the move to make poetry most paintings of Keats don't capture his physically active and Restless presence sevens famous miniature just here shows Keats seated with a sheet of paper and the two portraits that seven made after Keats death are studies of sedentary life as well one of them shows him reading at Wentworth Place Hampstead there he is the other has him sitting on a slope listening to nightingales we see a suburban poet safe at home in a suburban interior surrounded by a suburban landscape under the same old suburban moon we can call this Keats land the two chairs in the parlor at Keats House Hampstead are arranged exactly as in sevens picture forming a kind of still life without keys the reality of Keats's life was much more riskily unsettled it comprised a series of travels and poetic tests and trials that were conducted in a succession of temporary lodgings like burns and like Clare and Wordsworth keeps his poetic vision with anchored in his experience of the local and the immediate the word here appears in his poems 160 times to save you counting but unlike Burns and Clare and Wordsworth Keats never speaks or writes about his own native place his childhood was passed at Moorfields and Craven Street on the northern edge of London then slightly further afield to the north at Enfield Ponder's End and Edmonton instead of roots Keats experienced a series of dislocations that arguably equipped him to make good with whatever was to hand so each of the four books of Endymion was written in a different place that carries Brooke on the Isle of Wight at Margate at Hampstead Oxford Burford bridge and Box Hill places shaped the landscapes and the forms of his poems Endymion gets underway on an April morning at carisbrooke with its landscape of clear rills rushes Fenny ivy banks and coke cops clad valleys and then meanders through four thousand lines that respond to the various places of composition his first published poem to solitude contrasts the inner city and suburban nature much as his message of excuse for seven had done I stood tiptoe described scenes and sights on Hampstead Heath Isabella transforms Timnath into Tuscany and Lamia set in classical Corinth draws scenic props from the ancient English Cathedral City Winchester the homely lintel of the lovers chamber door may be a glimpse of Keats's Winchester lodgings the fretted splendor of each nook and niche comes from the cathedral and the college buildings while Corinth currents thronged streets and carriages with dazzling spokes mingle Grecian antiquity with the streets of an English provincial city even cider press into autumn had a local habitation it was kept in the precincts of sync Cross Hospital which is just down the river from the center of Winchester so place could be enabling to keeps his political purposes and by the same token it could also cause him problems he had to get away from Hampstead to begin Endymion and after an unsuccessful start on the Isle of Wight he quit Carisbrooke and headed to Margate where he knew he could compose productively so I want to ask why these patterns of place and displacement should have been necessary to his creativity in this Keats Memorial Lecture I explore some keep seein places and poetical purposes during 1818 by way of suggesting some of the complex ways in which place is registered in his poems I also want to offer you an energetic and active Keats who is very different from the Placid Placid passive poet who was once said to have had no interest in anything throughout I want to emphasize for you how creatively unsettled Keats his life actually was as he wrote his poetry in a sequence of transitory settings literally one might almost say writing poems on the road during 1818 Keats was at Hampstead London Exeter Timnath Torquay Honiton Bridport Hampstead read born Liverpool he's coming on to the map behind me now Liverpool and Lancaster Ambleside on the shores of Derwent water and the slopes of Skid or a castle ring stone circle in Kazakh Carlisle Dumfries Port Patrick Donahoe D Belfast alloway Glasgow Loch Lomond rest and be thankful which proved not to be a bar lock or Obon Carrera mal Iona staffer and Fort William having climbed all four thousand four hundred and eleven feet of ben nevis plus a little more he walked up the Great Glen to Inverness to bewdley with its Priory the black Isle and finally Cromartie on the cold north sea John Keats in Cromartie of all places there it is and the Little Harbour where he set sail back south to London Keats used to speak of his reach as a poet drawing the term from the reach of a boxer's punch in prizefighting we could also link poetic reach into tears travels from one end of Britain to the other to the summit of Ben Nevis where he wrote a sonnet and out to the many western islands already implicated with bards and lyrical realms of gold in his sonnet on first looking into Chapman's homer much of I traveled in the realms of gold Keats's famous sonnet begins with four words that establish a link between physical and imaginative journeys and indeed the sonnet itself was composed as Keats footed his way across London from Clark and well to Southwark but where did this imaginative dynamic come from the answer I think and as we might perhaps expect can be found in his early childhood when he was living on the shifting suburban edge of northern London it's important that the family business was linked to travel keeps his maternal grandfather owned a large livery stable equivalent now to a car rental agency and his father was the stable manager mobility was in Keats his blood and he had little experience or memory of a settled home life the death of his father and his mother's disappearance meant that his childhood was divided between school at Enfield and holidays at his grandmother's home after school came apprenticeship to dr. Hammond at Edmonton and this was most likely I think for just three years nevertheless those three years were formative for his creative life and I'll try to explain why Charles cowden Clark that his Keats's former schoolmaster takes up the story in his 1861 essay about Keats he remembers that the distance between our residents is being so short that is between Edmonton and Enfield I encourage Keats his inclination to come over when he could be spared and in consequence I saw him about five or six times a month it was on one of these visits that Clark read out Spencer's epithalamium and Keats took away a copy of The Faerie Queene the poem more that that more than any other determined him to become a poet what I want to suggest therefore is that from the outset keeps associated his discovery of poetry and the discoveries that poetry enables with traveling originally from Edmonton across the fields to the school at Enfield and subsequently to any and all of the places he found conducive to poetical purposes in his early phase when he was here at Guy's Hospital he headed to the landscape north of the city and eventually to Lee Hunt's home at the Vale of health this is the poet's house that is celebrated in sleep and poetry from where Keats tells us he had many miles on foot to fare in returning to his hospital duties at Guy's his epic walking tour of Scotland in summer 1818 was an ambitious extension of his more modest suburban paths to poetry and it was planned for poetical purposes in the Keats hoped together sublime images for his epic poem Hyperion like Wordsworth Keats was aware of how footing slow through a landscape could suggest poetic and intellectual advance and in one of his letters keeps lightened the composition of tintin Abby to a resting place to this point was Wordsworth come when he wrote tintin Abby keeps explains aware that Wordsworth poem was composed during at all as the poems title tells us and that more figuratively the poem constitutes a journey into the heart and nature of man associated with Keats's ideas of poetic travel were patterns and motifs that structured his imaginative life the inner city and escape from it repeated visits to Margate to the Isle of Wight and possibly to Tidmouth on two occasions more broadly speaking there is I think a westerly tendency in Keats's patterns of traveling that he associated with the many Western islands of verse and when I was going through this earlier today it reminded me that the family tradition held that the Keats family came from as far west as you can get in England that his Lands End that's what keeps his sister Fanny thought that Thomas Keats was from Lands End it's significant I think that keeps his first published poem the sonnet to solitude was a manifesto for creative mobility the poem recapitulates Keats his footsteps from the city's murky buildings to contemplate the steep slopes swell and span of an open landscape we can place the poems localities here in murky Southwark south of the River Thames and on Hampstead Heath with what Keats calls wide wandering for the greediest eye to peer about upon whereas Keats said that Southwark was a beastly place in dirt turnings and windings Hampstead wide wandering was open to the horizons crystal air as always with keeps such dirt and crystal contrasts were conducive to creativity and this may explain why for him traveling diverse locations and poetic purposes were so closely linked together equally Keats's imagined places those untrodden regions of his mind can shape poetic narratives and lyrical trajectories initially grounded here where men sit and hear each other groan the nightingale 8 takes flight on poetry's viewless wings and eventually arrives at a place of pure imagination here there is no light save what from heaven is with the breezes blown through vourderis glooms and winding mossy ways now that that wonderful suggestion suggestion of light from heaven with breezes blown creates its magic from a commonplace phrase a light breeze Keats deploys it again in the final stanza of to autumn where we hear that in a whale for choir the small gnats mourn among the river solos borne aloft or sinking as the light wind lives or dies gently reminding us of the soft dying day the phrase as the light wind lives or dies suggests that the poems imaginative impulse may be gradually fading - and by implication that its final stanza is actually enacting the process of seasonal change and transience witnessed in each of its lines contrasting and complementary Keats his beastly place in dirt turnings and windings and his winding mossy ways are based on go image the labyrinth known to him from LAN Priya's classical dictionary as a building whose numerous passages and perplexing windings render the escape from it difficult there were four very famous among the ancients long prior says and these were broadly speaking of two types the labyrinth that Lemnos was admirable for beauty and splendor and so was the Egyptian labyrinth the beauty and the art of the building were almost beyond belief long prayer says as were its vaulted halls each with six doors beyond which was said to be three thousand chambers such were the labyrinths of beauty and art then there was the labyrinth of Crete built by Daedalus this long pier says was the place of confinement for Daedalus himself and the prison of the mine at all Daedalus was the most ingenious artist of his age according to long prayer and as we know he escaped from the labyrinth with his son Icarus on wings of feathers and wax keeps his phrase the viewless wings of powers II in his Nightingale ode comes from Milton and that a bit of a stretch might also be said to allude to Daedalus his escape from his prison more certain is the fact that the idea of the labyrinth was embodied for Keats in his early poems by the winding lanes and alleys of inner-city London the urban labyrinth from which he escaped into poetry so I want to suggest that those classical all-out labyrinths embodied for keeps by the winding London streets were prototypes for Keats is peculiarly labyrinthine poetics receiving a laurel crown from Leigh hunt excited thoughts of poetry's Delphic labyrinth we hear in sleep and poetry of how the imagination into most lovely labyrinths will be gone and elsewhere Keats rights of poetry's labyrinths of sweet utterance the narrative of Endymion and the formal architecture the passages and chambers of the eve of st. Agnes have labyrinthine qualities so do the more fanciful Maisy footsteps Maisy range Maisy dance and Maisy world of some of his earliest poems if labyrinthine lub loot loveliness lends its alia to the imaginative life it can also represent the dangers of living too intensely in and through the imagination as we read into the second part of Lamia aware of passions passing Belle Lyceus tells Lamia that he is striving how to entangle trammel up and snare your soul in mine and labyrinth you there one can be imprisoned by imaginations labyrinths as Daedalus discovered and when Keats described subjects turnings and windings as beastly perhaps he was thinking of the minor tors labyrinthine home as this sketch map of Southwark shows us the maze and maze pond were streets that Keats walked each day while he was studying at Guy's Hospital his lodgings at st. Thomas's Street and Dean Street were in the center of this perplexing network and it was from here that he breezed away into beautiful scenery for poetical purposes that juxtaposition of physical constraint an imaginative release evident in Keats his first published poem to solitude reappears throughout his career tellingly he was most poetically productive month by month and line by line when he was employed full-time here at the center of the Southwark labyrinth in guy's hospital only slightly less productive were his 60 days living at Timnath in England's West Country from March to May of 1818 there's ten within Keats his day an image that I think actually dates from 1818 so that's pretty much what he knew when he lived there with a population of 4,000 Timnath was a fashionable seaside resort there were 12 bathing machines and you can see them just there look along the far side of the beach 12 bathing machines hot baths an assembly room a public library that took the London papers including Hunt's Examiner and a theater where the most famous actor of the day edmund kean had scratched his name on the green room wall temperate air and sea breezes were believed to waft off all injurious particles but what Keats experienced were weeks of Devonshire rain that made it a splashy rainy misty snowy foggy Haley floody muddy slipshod County on one night he lay awake listening to yet another downpour imagining himself drowned and rotted like a grain of wheat he stayed here just over eight weeks during which he wrote some 10 poems and sent a dozen letters to friends in London at least one of these poems is a major work that is Isabella or the pot of basil while the tragic action of Isabella takes place in 14th century Florence its setting is drawn from the landscape around Tidmouth we are told that Lorenzo with light steps went up a western Hill and bade the Sun farewell an imagined location that was almost certainly based on sholden Hill prominent to the west of Timnath overlooking the shipmaster forests that you can see there Keats also tells us how the river arno stream the river arno stream gurgles through straightened banks and still death fan itself with dancing bulrush and the bream keeps head against the fresh it's if you've been to Florence you'll know that the broad and stately river Arno does not gurgle under dancing bullrushes a West Country fresh it one of many Keats had seen and heard in the southern spring of 1818 certainly does when Keats wrote I see and sing by my own eyes inspired in his most overtly visionary poem ode to psyche it's difficult to resist the surmise that he meant just that his haunted forest boughs and branch in Falls grew from pines and dark clustered trees that he had actually seen seamus heaney said that he had discovered poetry through reading Keats and keeps his poetry like Heaney's is most often the music of what happens so having suggested how intricately place and poetics are entwined in Keats I want to outline now how place in poetic thought more particularly a linked before moving to Keats and his Scottish tour in the summer of 1818 Isabella shows us that like Southwark Timnath had swiftly infiltrated his imagination and the place also advanced his thinking about the imaginative life strangely and strikingly Keats described this little coastal town of four thousand souls as the labyrinth of Timnath with its narrow streets and alleyways it is still now very difficult to find one's way around I gave a paper there in February last year went there the day before to ascertain why where the ice factory theater was which took some finding came back the next day and I couldn't couldn't find it at all so it is it is actually true Keats sat indoors under hatches because of incessant rain started to form from the labyrinth of Timnath an image for his thinking about poetry and the poetic life I have ever been too sensible of the labyrinthine path to eminence in art he tells his painter friend Benjamin hey be writing to his poet friend John Hamilton Reynolds about shared creative endeavors he says you've been going through the same labyrinth that I have Keats's recent branchings from their intellectual labyrinth were his reflections on Wordsworth and Milton and his idea of human life is a large mansion of many apartments in which we proceed through a series of chambers and dark passageways each with many doors that mansion is usually too said to come from the Bible from since John's Gospel I think it may also derive from the Egyptian labyrinth with its three thousands chambers and somewhat less exotic and imposing 20 the Strand Timnath with it's three floors structured around a central staircase of which the doors lead into various rooms that's where they stayed and outside those lodgings was the labyrinth of Timnath a physical embodiment of the labyrinthine path to eminence in art through which keeps felt himself to be edging forwards feeling the burden of the mystery following Wordsworth along the dark passages of existence labyrinth labyrinths and labyrinthine are among Keats his favorite words they are all early and orally gratifying and easy to accommodate to an iambic rhythm and trembles through my labyrinthine hair is one of his lines using this word appearing some 10 times in his poems the word labyrinth occurs just three times in his letters and those three letters were all written at Timnath confined by the Timnath labyrinth enveloped in clouds keeps was also composing Isabella and projecting his summer tour of Scotland as formerly in the maze of Southwark he was plotting a remarkable Odyssey for poetical purposes that will prepare him for his greatest greatest creative challenge so far his attempt at an epic poem there is a direct correlation here between the reach of Keats's epic ambition and the daunting scale of the journey he envisaged for the summer of 80 18 accompanied by Charles Armitage Brown on Thursday the 25th of June keeps set off on foot from Lancaster on what would prove to be a 600 mile hike they were on their way to Wordsworth's lake district and his home at Riedel Mount then North Woods to Robert Burns is Dumfries the Scottish Highlands the Isles of Mull and Iona and Fingal's cave on staffer here in the far-off Hebrides Keats went footing slow through the many western islands his Chapman's home asan it had associated with the poetic life contrariwise places through which he was now walking would help to create poetic insights both immediately and in the longer term he wrote 15 poems on this tour of which nine are what we could call significant works on visiting the tomb of burns old meg she was a gypsy a song about myself to a also rock this mortal body of a thousand days Lyons written in the Highlands not Aladdin Magian read me a lesson muse and stanzas on some skulls in Beulah Abbey he also envisaged using the mountains of the Lake District and the Highlands as the backdrop for his epic poem a plan that Hyperion shows was fulfilled and there was a third creative dynamic to the tour the one that's not often considered this is keeps his enthusiastic explorations of ruined Abbey's and priories at link luden and and redden and Glen Luce this is Glen loose that you can see here moving around a little bit but you get the idea of it Glen loose cross red Yule and our Iona and Bewley the is antiquarian forays into gothic interiors contributed to keeps his idea of Fingal's cave as a cathedral of the sea and what he fastened onto was the idea that these columns Glen loose were composed of small pillars that are bound together his image for it was a bundle of twigs or matchsticks and he saw the same structure in the stone of Fingal's cave these antiquarian forays into gothic interiors contributed to his idea of Fingal's cave and further ahead helped him materialize the architecture of the eve of sin Agnes with its Chapel Isle it's carve it angel it's portal doors buttress broad hall pillar lowly Archard way little moonlight room closet balustrade and foot warren stones they landed at Mull on grass point with some 37 miles to go to Iona that is if this would settle down just here on grass point they walked across the island of Carrara and landed here and walked right the way up Glen more across here and out to Iona that little green circle is helpful for reasons I'll explain in a moment the most wretched walk Keats called it and on the second day on the island Thursday the 23rd Keats was breakfasting here in a remote farmhouse called Darien a Cullen the ancient house under the waterfall where he began a letter to his brother he was writing it in that room the public room of the house which was inhabited until 1940 now if you look at my biography of Keats this is where I begin the story and shortly after the Christmas following the publication of the biography I had a letter from a person I'd ever heard of for but I now know Christine Harding saying she brought her husband a copy of the book not knowing anything about it or what was in it her husband ran it sat down to read it on Christmas afternoon and he said the book begins at Derry nakulan and Christine Harding is the descendant of the family that last lived in the farmhouse and new it's new it's long history and she sent me some photographs of it when it was still inhabited in the 1930s after the shepherd's hut where they had slept the previous night there in the Cullen was by comparison a mansion as Keats told his brother John Tom will be it not one with many apartments the next stretch of their journey took them 16 miles to the boat across to Iona or I calm kill then is now a place of great antiquarian fascination and their ities you can see the roof is obviously on the church now it wasn't him keeps his day it was already a fashionable destination for visitors and it all astonished Keats here on this tiny island surrounded by the stormy Atlantic with the ruins of a fine Cathedral Church of cloisters colleges monasteries and nunneries he described for his brother Tom a spot in the churchyard where they say 61 Kings are buried 48 Scotch from Fergus ii to macbeth 8 irish for norwegian and one french they lie in rows compact then we were shown other matters of later date but still very ancient many tombs of highland chieftains their effigies in armor face upwards black and moss covered Abbot's and bishops of the island always one of the chief clans surrounded surrounding the ruins was a desolate hinterland of windswept rocks wind scrap windswept trees reeds and seafoam all reminiscent of James Macpherson's mournful poems of Ossian as we're these carved stone effigies of the kings and warriors aussie UNS chiefs of old the race that are no more in months to come I own as warriors would reappear as the pale kings and princes of labelled Damned saw mercy a poem that was saturated by keeps his Scottish experience each stanza of the poem has three lines of four measures followed by one of two measures and is technically identical to the first four lines of Burns's favorite six line verse when we first encounter Saturn in Hyperion he is quiet as a stone still couchant on the earth as Keats had seen these giant effigies of the ancient Scottish Klansmen horizontal in the churchyard there now obviously in indoors and in the museum as the dark entrance of Fingal's cave came into view between its soaring columns of black basalt rock it brought to mind the Celtic Warrior Fingal father of Macpherson's bard Ossian last of all his race approaching more closely Keats noticed a more homely detail one may compare the surface of the island to a roof he told his brother what I think he meant was that viewed from the sea Stauffers peculiar rock formations looked and still looked like the carefully dressed edges of a thatched roof Burns's cottage at a low way which keeps had recently visited was thatched and Fingal's cave would prove to be a poet's mansion - with the seed dashing below keep stepped in dr. Johnson's footsteps along the ledge of broken pillars as far as the caves in a most point the extremity of the cave where he says he found a small perforation into another for solemnity and grandeur it far surpasses the finest cathedral Keats informed Tom so immense were the rock formations they seem to have been carved by giants who rebelled against Jove so step by step the scenery of his epic was taking shape the Fallen Titans are depicted in the poem on stony ledges and shelves taken I think directly from Fingal's cave this is the kind of thing he has in mind Keats completed his letter to Tom by signing off with an extraordinary poem in which Milton's young poet Lissa das drowned and swept by sounding sees beyond the stormy Hebrides is discovered in Fingal's cave sleeping there on the marble cold and bare once again as many times Keats had been lured to some old caverns mouth and the shadowy sound of a mighty poet Milton ah Sein and Mo stationed ancient of them all Orpheus I think that the shape of Fingal's cave culminating at its extremity in a small gap into another cave had for Keats a kind of Iraq Euler significance as a mouthpiece of the gods architected thus he says by the great Oceanus all of these suggestions all of these associations suggest that Keats was thinking further into his projected epoch there a striking resemblance between poetic encounter on the marble cold and bare of Fingal's cave and more Netta's or ocular pronouncements about poetry in the first canto of the fall of Hyperion if thou canst not ascend these steps Minetta tells keeps his poet dreamer die on that marble where thou art the steps that he has to climb towards poetic immortality were most likely recalled from Fingal's cave slicked and smartened with classical marble to avoid the bay thought of if thou canst not ascend these steps die on that basalt where thou art actually works quite well definitely cute the letter to Joseph 7 with which I began this talk Keats had warped north and looked into beautiful scenery for poetic purposes discovering poetry through tests and trials at thresholds on edges and at extremities of physical endurance and imaginative response more than the miraculous May of 1819 and the suburban ODEs of that springtime of the Living year the Footloose Keats of summer 1818 was perhaps most acutely attuned to his own imaginative restlessness by Saturday the first of August they were at Fort William and at 5:00 a.m. on Sunday morning set out with a guide and his dog to climb been nervous by the mountain track a strenuous but straightforward ascent from Glen nervous to the summit above 4,000 feet above the sea later Keats described how the mountains immense head is composed of large stones with chasms the finest wonder of the whole they appear great rents in the very heart of the mountain astonishing astonishingly the summit of this gigantic mountain was also open to the depths and Keats did what we're all told not to do he threw stand stones over the edge of the chasm to set the echoes at work in fine style and then he sat a few feet from the edge of a precipice and he wrote a sonnet read me a lesson muse and speak it loud upon the top of nevus blind in mist I look into the chasms and a shroud vapora 'the death hide them just so much i whisked mankind do know of hell I look her head and there is sullen mist even so much mankind can tell of heaven misty spread before the earth beneath me even such even so vague is man's sight of himself here are the craggy stones beneath my feet thus much I know that a poor witless elf I tread on them that all my idath meat is mist and crag not only on this height but in the world of thought and mental might we see not the balance of good and evil we are in a mist Keats had written in a letter from Timnath here now Keats was literally blind in mist on ben nevis and his poem had come to him while he was a sightless as the blind poet of paradise lost but what was his muse his lesson thus much seems to be Keats his Keats's surmise thus much I know that I tread and he goes on to describe for his brother how the slippery scree forced him to take a chance sometimes on two sometimes on three sometimes four legs sometimes two and stick sometimes three and stick then four again then two then a jump ringing changes on foot hand stick jump Bogle stumble foot hand foot very gingerly stick again and then again a game at all fours on been nervous every step was a gamble at risk of slip and fall a hazardous boggling balancing act that by ringing changes on foot moves onwards much as an iambic pulse footing slow along the lines of his poems in pair movement into realms of gold the huge crags the shattered heart and cloud veils of the mountain appealed to Keats his epic ambitions and his response was characteristic having stood tiptoe on a little hill at Hampstead he now scrambled up a can of stones and as he told Tom so got a little higher than old Ben himself that urge to reach higher and out climb the peak of ben nevis is for me essential Keats a reminder of how he had once gazed up at the daunting cliff of poetry he had determined to climb by out summiting the summit of old Ben he reached another Keats Ian's extremity it would be difficult I think to find a physical or imaginative location further from the windings of Southwark or indeed the comforts of suburban Keats land with his Scottish tour cut short by his failing health Keats now faced four long months of caring for his brother who was in the final stages of tuberculosis weakened by the Scottish tour and with a recurrent sore throat Keats was almost certainly infected with pulmonary consumption in the brothers apartment at well walk in Hampstead here it is their their lodgings were actually where the the the pub is now but the building one surmises I surmised was he dint identical to that one their actual lodgings have have disappeared I'm afraid as at Timnath during the previous spring they were living in a small room that was most likely poorly ventilated damp and heated by open coal fires an ideal environment for the airborne transmission of tuberculosis because they had no understanding of how tuberculosis was spread their physical proximity was not an issue that tom was coughing up tubercular bacilli into the air breathe by his brother would not have crossed their minds once although Keats did admit darkly that not able to that not able to leave him for more than a few hours he felt himself to be living in a continual fever it must be poisonous to life although I feel well in an early poem Keats had described little bright-eyed things that float about the air on as your wings and from first to last his poems are filled with the effects of breezes breath and breathing as if uncannily aware of the microscopic origin of tubercular infection even though he had no rational conception of the insidious airborne things that were infecting his lungs Keats his school friend Charles Karen Clark visited the brothers at well walk during the autumn of 1818 and he thought that the situation there in all probability hastened keeps his own summons he had travelled from the cloud and rain of Devon to the mists of ben nevis to a tubercular miasma Atwell walk that the rod-shaped bacterium of pulmonary consumption was a microscopic version of the mighty rods of basalt in Fingal's cave was fortunately unknown to Keats release from this infected prison came through his earliest work on Hyperion although progress was limited for months he had been preparing his grand attempt at epic beginning as far back as March 1817 with his visit to the British Museum and its awe-inspiring fragments of Grecian grandeur that been further anticipations in Endymion and a letter to Hayden had announced that unlike his poetic romance his epic poem the in his epic poem the march of passion and endeavor will be undeviating he had made intensive study of Shakespeare Milton carries Dante and the excursion as well as long prayers classical dictionary and he had just returned from his trek around Scotland for poetical purposes even with all of these resources assembled however he found this long anticipated poem beset with difficulties as he looked back he saw himself setting about Endymion in a spirit of dauntless independence whereas now he was paralyzed by misgivings in Endymion I leaped headlong into the sea he told his publisher who was all to wear aware of his present hesitation since Endymion all of his reading and speculations about the poetical character had now combined to make him pause there was a social dimension to back then his brothers George and Tom had given support and fellow poets like Hunt Reynolds Clark and Matthew had all encouraged now that nurturing community had fragmented leaving Keats confronted by the achievements of Dante and Shakespeare Milton and Wordsworth suspecting that there was nothing original to be written in poetry so there might have been further delay had he had not Keats found himself obliged to write on Monday the 21st of September to ease his worry about Tom as early autumnal rain scattered leaves along well walk he set down the opening paragraph of Hyperion in fourteen lines that are so subdued they seemed to question the possibility of his poem proceeding further deep in the shady sadness of a veil far sunken from the healthy breath of morn far from the fiery noon and eaves one star sat gray-haired Saturn quiet as a stone still as the silence roundabout his lair still as the silence roundabout his lair forests on forests hung above his head like cloud on cloud no stir of not so much life as on a summer's day Rob's not one light seed from the feathered grass but where the dead leaf fell there did it rest a stream went voiceless by still deadened more by reason of his fallen divinity spreading a shade the Nyad mid her reeds pressed her cold fingers closer to her lips commencing his epic with a blank verse sonnet Keats began to master Milton's organic numbers in cadence his tempered to an announcement of fallen divinity the scene I think is a recollection of Shanklin chime the coastal gorge he had visited back in 1817 more intricately in word than anything Keats had written so far his blank verse creates a complex lattice into oven by alliteration assonance and half rhymes while the Nyad presses her cold finger closer to her lips as if cautioning him to be silent Keats intended these fourteen lines to announce an epic narrative comprising thousands of lines yet they might also have followed a more winding Lee introspective path and perhaps lapsed into voiceless nests as he embarked on his long projected poem Cates his imagination was travelling in two directions towards the shadow Ian's witness of the nightingale load and more expensively towards the wider horizons of epic narrative we've seen these two dynamics in Keats throughout 1818 in his forays into the interiors of poets houses at Riedel Mount dunfries and Alloway the mansion at Darien a Cullen where he raped at on and inside Fingal's cave where he had encountered Milton's Lycidas at the same time we have a company key to remotest Mull Iona and staffer to the summit of Ben Nevis and the North Sea coast 1818 had seen the departure of George and his wife to America and poor Tom's death on the 1st of December meant that Keats was now alone except for his sister Fanny who was living at Walthamstow he had no relatives that are known to us early one morning Charles Brown recalled I was awakened in my bed by a pressure on my hand it was Keith's who came to tell me his brother was no more had you not better live with me Brown inquired he paused pressed my hand warmly and replied I think it would be better and so 1819 came in with Keats moving from where Ward to Wentworth place where he was to remain as Brown's lodger until summer 1820 their epic work of the previous summer had fostered a warm friendship and one could argue that the zigzagging path down from the summit of ben nevis led indirectly to the door of what is now Keats house in Keats Grove Hampstead I hope that what I've said this evening has convinced you that Keats his remarkably Footloose life roaming across the length and breadth of Britain was also a life of creative continuities from place to place as the significant locations of his life helped to shape his authorial identity equally ideas of the labyrinth of escape from the city the lair of the west summits and thresholds houses and caves informed and embodied he's thinking about poetry and the poems he created in Isabella and Hyperion he made huge advances in poetic technique in narrative dynamics and sustained creative energy making imaginative strides that have vigorous counterparts in his remarkably active physical life so perhaps I should conclude by returning to what I said at the outset but with a slightly different emphasis it now seems to me that the sedentary physically immobile Keats that we see in sevens portraits seated silent in helped to form the Victorians idea of a passive and a cyclic eats an idea that surprisingly perhaps still persists today ironically however that idea of Keats was guaranteed by the vigorous actuality of the poet's life that the paintings decline to have shout to show us much have we traveled in the course of this 2019 Keats Memorial Lecture I hope you'll agree in winding up that attending to places patterns and poetical purposes can tell us a good deal about how Keats came to poetry and about some of the lived origins of his extraordinary imaginative achievement I'm not going to leave you on the summit of been nervous or even a peak in Darien or the depths of Fingal's cave but with a pleasing thought I hope that we'll all here this evening within just a few yards of where so many of Keats's travels in the realms of gold actually began well I'm sure you won't agree what an incredible title and how brilliantly fulfilled it was linking the place of Keats life to his transcended poetry and showing how important location was to him that brings us to the end of an absolutely splendid lecture over the fifty years this lecture has been given not only by many of the greatest Keith scholars but by many of the great figures in poetry of the time we've heard a contribution tonight which is totally worthy of the 50th lecture and please join me in thanking our lecturer for a wonderful contribution you [Applause]

Channel: kingscollegelondon

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Keywords: king's college london, john keats, poetry

Id: 6XLnEcXn2Fk

Length: 59min 7sec (3547 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 18 2019