ROMANTIC POLITICS

Like a nested set of matching bookends, the great English poets of the romantic era died in reverse order of their birth: the last born the first to die, the first born the last. From Wordsworth (1770-1850) to Coleridge (1772- 1834) to Byron (1788-1824) to Shelley (1792-1822), their years progressively dwindle until, in the center, comes John Keats, born in 1795 and dead in 1821 at the age of twenty-five.

How much good poetry Wordsworth and Coleridge produced after their prime is open to question, but there seems no doubt that Keats died before he could exhaust his genius. Consumptively fading away from tuberculosis, he didn’t even have his entire brief life in which to work. In the single year of 1819, at twenty-two, he entered the pantheon of English poets by writing “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” and his six magnificent odes: “To Psyche,” “To a Nightingale,” “On a Grecian Urn,” “On Melancholy,” “On Indolence,” and “To Autumn.” After that year, he was too sick to write much.

This combination — of early death and youthful production, of promise both fulfilled and unfulfilled — has proved irresistible to scholars and popular writers alike, and the shelves are bursting with biographies of the doomed romantic poet. There’s the two-volume 1925 John Keats by the wealthy poetaster Amy Lowell, for example, and there’s Robert Gittings’s 1968 John Keats. In 1964 alone, Aileen Ward won the National Book Award for her biography of the poet and Walter Jackson Bate won the Pulitzer Prize for his. And now we have Keats: A Biography by Andrew Motion.

Motion’s own volumes of poetry include 1995’s The Price of Everything and 1997’s Salt Water, but he is best known for Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, the extraordinarily well-received biography of the poet he published in 1993. Having written, in addition, studies of such poets as Edward Thomas and Elizabeth Bishop, and having edited a volume of selected poems by Thomas Hardy, Motion was well positioned to produce an interesting study of the life of his romantic precursor.

Unfortunately, in Keats: A Biography he decided to concentrate not on Keats’s poetry, but on Keats’s politics. And once he weds himself to the thesis that Keats’s political commitments were integral to his poetic achievement, Motion cannot find a way to address the whole body of the poetry.

The bare facts of the poet’s life are brutal. He lost his father to an accident when he was nine, his mother to remarriage and then to tuberculosis when he was fourteen, and his younger brother Tom to tuberculosis when Keats was twenty-three.

And yet, in other ways, his life was not so hard. Born into a relatively prosperous east London family, the son of a hostler who had married his master’s daughter and later took over the business, Keats was not poverty- stricken in childhood. His mother was affectionate, though she tended to let her children shift as they might.

After boarding school, he completed the apothecary’s course at Guy’s and St. Thomas’s hospitals in London, which could have led to his becoming a surgeon. But he decided instead to be a poet, living on a small inheritance from his parents and grandparents. Apart from a constant worry over his trustees’ mishandling of his money, he fretted primarily about his height — barely more than five feet — and his lack of a thorough grounding in Latin and Greek. His friends regarded him as “cheerful, good-tempered, and clever.” His touching concern for his family led him to nurse his mother and his brother as they died of tuberculosis — which almost certainly was the direct cause of his own death.

In addition to his poetry, Keats wrote hundreds of letters to his friends and family that, if we had them all (unfortunately, he periodically destroyed as many as he could), would provide an almost daily chronicle of his life and ideas. He made friends easily and kept them, and his surviving letters show a person bursting with energy and using all his senses to apprehend the world and to explore poetic effect, his own imaginative powers, and life itself.

Like all Keats’s biographers, Andrew Motion has turned to these extraordinary letters in order to flesh out the life and to make his case that Keats was deeply influenced by the social and political culture of his age. “Embedding” Keats’s life in his times and “examining his liberal beliefs, ” Motion wants to show how they “shaped the argument as well as the language of his work.”

Keats’s writing . . . commemorates patriotic heroes such as King Arthur, Robin Hood, John Milton, Algernon Sidney. . . . He engages with the issue of military power, with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, with the repressive effects of the Corn Laws, enclosures and the Six Acts, with radicals such as Cobbett, Kosciusko [who led the Polish insurrection of 1794 and became a hero to the romantics], and his early mentor Leigh Hunt, and with the plight of people working in factories.

The facts are there. Certainly Keats was not unworldly. Neither was his experience “mainly literary,” as the deconstructionist Paul de Man once claimed — echoing a long line of nineteenth-century readers who accepted Shelley’s mythic reading of Keats in Adonais as a “pure spirit,” ” neglected and apart; / A herd-abandoned deer struck by the hunter’s [i.e., his reviewers’] dart.” But it was of course tuberculosis, not the critics, that killed him. Keats’s letters show him fully engaged in a world that he courageously recognized as “full of misery and heartbreak, pain, sickness and oppression.”

Motion’s difficulties making his case emerge primarily from the fact that he is not a historian-or at least not a sufficient historian to weave a tapestry of the times rather than merely list the historical events that occurred during Keats’s life. He has done no original research, and, as he acknowledges, his thoughts “owe a big debt to the three biographies of Keats written in the 1960s.” He claims that he has used previous biographies “not so much as things to read and reread but as subjects to interview.” Far too often, however, Motion merely paraphrases or does no more than sum up what others have written — particularly Robert Gittings, who retrieved many new or overlooked details of Keats’s life (as, for example, that Keats had caught syphilis from the whores in The Borough, which surrounds Guy’s Hospital).

Throughout his book, Motion is regrettably dull. About a famous evening in October 1816 — when Keats read George Chapman’s translation of Homer and wrote his first perfectly finished poem, the sonnet that begins Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold — Motion is inadequate and general where Gittings is exciting, moving, and particular. And even about the poetry, Motion seems able to give only flat paraphrases.

Such blandness is surprising, not just because Motion is himself a poet, but because his biography of Larkin was crisply and often tenderly written, with an astute and imaginative understanding of Larkin’s poetry. In Philip Larkin, he eschewed all the political correctness of the world of contemporary critics (much to Larkin’s eternal relief, no doubt). In Keats, however, he seems afraid of getting too close to others’ words (a fault he does not always avoid) and is much too entranced with his own thesis of Keats as a political poet.

Motion is responding in part to the aggressive hypothesis of recent criticism that all literature is political because “universal truth” is a cultural fiction. Critics now argue for the socio-political grounding of Keats’s poetry in contrast to the aesthetic and metaphysical emphases of earlier critics. Keats’s literary technique and themes are thus required nowadays to reflect his lower-middle class, his liberal, semi-deist family, his political mentors, and his era’s reaction to the failure of the French Revolution. And so the Titans and Olympians in Keats’s Hyperion are examined for their political relationship, the greed of the brothers in Isabella comprises an indictment of capitalism, and the poet’s very style is declared to be “radical.”

These are not necessarily false insights. The fact that something is fashionable doesn’t necessarily mean it has nothing to contribute to our understanding. But Keats hated what he described as “poetry that has a palpable design upon us — and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket.” The “transparently political” (that is, rebelliously irregular) style of Endymion carped at by critics of Keats’s day was by and large that of Leigh Hunt, Keats’s friend, political mentor, and editor of the radical Examiner — and the man from whom Keats most needed to free himself, not so much because of the weaknesses of Hunt’s politics as the weaknesses of Hunt’s poetic style.

Other than trendy professors, who would think to read Keats for his politics? We cannot know what he would have written, though it is not impossible that he might in later life have managed excellent poetry with a political charge. But in what we do have from Keats, there are no political poems as good as those of Milton, Marvell, or Dryden. Early in his brief career, he tried, producing in December 1816 the political sonnet To Kosciusko, which has the heavily enjambed lines, feminine rhymes, and barely relevant, lush imagery of a poetic style nurtured by Hunt. It begins:

Good Kosciusko, thy great name alone Is a full harvest whence to reap high feeling; It comes upon us like the glorious pealing Of the wide spheres – – an everlasting tone.

Contrast such floundering with the compelling way Keats opens On the Grasshopper and Cricket, an apolitical sonnet written in the same month, where his sensuous perception of the physical world bursts — with magnificent monosyllabic force — out of the poetic form:

The poetry of earth is never dead.

When all the birds are faint with the hot sun

And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run

From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead.

Written in fifteen minutes on a dare, the sonnet already anticipates Keats’s last great ode, To Autumn, and shows just how unhelpful any purely political reading of the poet must be.

Nonetheless, because there is in the course of Motion’s six-hundred pages much plain fact laid out in historical order and copious use of Keats’s letters, this new volume will give readers a haunting image of a very physical Keats — living the most imaginative of lives and dying the most miserable of deaths. Keats’s early end has always made him a romantic figure, and Motion has at least managed to maintain the romance of the person, if not the poet, who was John Keats.

Margaret Boerner teaches English at Villanova University.