Study Guide to Ode to a Grecian Urn and Other Works by John Keats

INTRODUCTION TO JOHN KEATS

EARLY LIFE AND SCHOOLING

John Keats was born in a northern suburb of London on October 31, 1795. His parents were the keepers of a prosperous livery stable called the Swan and Hoop, and young John, the eldest of four surviving children, together with his brothers George and Tim and his sister Frances, seems to have lived a happy and uneventful life for his first seven or eight years. Then, very suddenly, disaster struck the family. Keats’ father died in a riding accident, his mother quickly remarried and then left her new husband and her children, returning later only to die of tuberculosis, watched over by John. Finally, the grandmother, who after his parents’ death had given the children a home, also died. Luckily the young Keats was not left entirely abandoned. At his school at Enfield, which he attended from 1803 to 1811, he made a lifelong friend of Charles Cowden Clarke, the son of the headmaster. However, Richard Abbey, the trustee and guardian of the family’s small estate was an unscrupulous man who manipulated the funds in his trust, withheld money improperly from the Keats children, and immeasurably added to the burden of the young poet-to-be during his short life.

POETRY AS A VOCATION

When Keats left Enfield, at the age of sixteen, he was apprenticed to Thomas Hammond, an apothecary-surgeon, to begin his training for the medical profession. He did not lose touch with Clarke, however, who encouraged his former pupil to develop his literary interests and who introduced him to the work - Spenser’s The Faerie Queene - which inspired Keats’ first extant poem, an Imitation of Spenser. In October, 1815, Keats went up to London as a medical student, still writing verses in his spare time, and as the months passed, debated the choice between surgery and poetry as a profession. By September, 1816, as we learn from the Epistle to Charles Cowden Clarke, the decision had been made, and as if to put a seal on that decision, Keats wrote, in October, the first of his great poems, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.

By this time the young poet had already been introduced to Leigh Hunt and had become the older man’s disciple, picking up certain vulgar mannerisms from Hunt that were to be hard to shake off and that would give critics the basis for their later, bitter attacks. But this was characteristic of the whole of Keats’ brief career. Becoming a poet was to be for him like a voyage of discovery, of self-discovery. He would try everything he met with on the way, be momentarily influenced by every experience, and all the while would slowly come to a knowledge of himself and of his own voice.

The history of that voyage of discovery is recorded in the poems, a chronological study of which follows. That Keats reached his goal is clear from his work; that when he died of tuberculosis in 1821 he had not lived long enough to know that he had reached it, is plain from the epitaph he composed for himself and which marks his grave in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome:

This Grave Contains all that was mortal of a Young English Poet who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone Here lies One Whose name was writ in Water.

THEMES IN KEATS’ POETRY

The Transience Of Life

The chief qualities of Keats’ poetry had their roots in the writer’s early experiences. One of the central themes in the poems, for example, is the brevity, the transience, the fragility of life, and it is impossible not to associate this theme with a number of the events of the poet’s childhood - the sudden death of his father, the disappearance and later the death of his mother, the death of his grandmother and, still later, the death of his brother Tom. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising to find Keats obsessed, in his poetry, with the subject of beauty that must die. But if the reality of death was brutally imposed upon him by events, his response to that reality was his own. He might well have given up on life, abandoned it as too painful to contemplate as other men have. Instead, the very transience of beauty made him commit himself even more tenaciously to its pursuit and appreciation. One critic has said of Keats that he was a man for whom the physical world exists, and Keats himself indicated that the quality in Shakespeare which he most admired was thinginess, the sense of the object itself having been communicated. Before anything else, Keats was true to things-as-they-are in his poetry.

The Oxymora Of Life

Another insight which experience - especially the experience with his mother - forced on Keats was the paradoxical nature of the world. Keats had loved his mother very much, and then suddenly he found himself abandoned by her. For the rest of his life, therefore, his attitude toward women, both in his own experience and in his poetry, was ambiguous. He could not do without women, yet he could not bring himself to trust them; thus there came into being in his works such figures as Cynthia, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Lamia - women who are at once enticing and treacherous like his mother and like Fanny Brawne, the girl he deeply loved but of whom he was frequently (and unreasonably) jealous.

But the experience with his mother did not only affect Keats’ attitude toward women, it colored his whole vision of life, brought him to see life as a series of inevitable and unavoidable contradictions: joy as a function of sorrow, beauty as a function of death. Indeed, this insight into the paradox of life is a key to the understanding of all of the poet’s best work, this commitment to light-and-shade-together one of his greatest strengths. The Greek word for a phrase - like aching pleasure, for example - which unites two contradictory ideas in a single, meaningful term, is oxymoron (plural oxymora). It is Keats’ profound oxymoronic vision of the world, his ability to hold two conflicting ideas in his mind at the same time and still continue to function, which gives his work its characteristic maturity, richness, and depth.

Negative Capability

Anyone who is profoundly committed to the world and to its contradictions, as Keats was, must, as a corollary, be able to resist the temptation to do something about those contradictions. Most people have fairly naive notions about neatness and order and are as offended by oxymora, by paradoxes in life, as a housewife is by an unmade bed. Such people are constantly developing theories or philosophies to prove that the contradictions are only apparent, that paradoxes can be explained, that oxymora are just games with words. Yet such simple-minded orderliness actually belies the complex reality of life, and to have the strength to resist this impulse to neatness is what Keats called negative capability, the ability to refrain from attempting to shape the world and to allow the world to shape you.

Many people who claim to love the world really only love it when things are going well or really only love their own theory