'Till Love and Fame to Nothingness Do Sink'

Dr. Johnson thought the first aim of biography was utilitarian: “I esteem biography, as giving us what comes near to ourselves, what we can turn to use.” The reader reads the life of another, reflects on it and applies the lessons he deduces to himself. In the early pages of his 1963 biography John Keats, W. Jackson Bate likens the life of the poet to an unexpected figure: Abraham Lincoln. Both overcame unpromising beginnings unlikely to encourage achievement, and succeeded. In this they resemble another artist, Louis Armstrong, and Johnson himself. Bate writes: 

“Of no major writer, in any language, have the early years more closely paralleled the traditional folktales of the orphan forced to seek his own fortune. No self-conscious fear of sentimentality, no uneasy wriggle backward into the sophistications or timidities of detachment, can minimize this moving and unexpected beginning.”

 

The notion of Keats as an ethereal sprite, Romanticism’s darling, was wrong from the start. He was a tough Cockney whose medical training helped fortify him for a life of sickness and early death, and who crafted some of the richest lines in the language. Consider his sonnet written in January 1818 when he was twenty-two:

 

“When I have fears that I may cease to be

   Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,

Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,

   Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;

When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,

   Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

   Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,

   That I shall never look upon thee more,

Never have relish in the faery power

   Of unreflecting love—then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.”

 

John Berryman took the title of his 1970 volume Love & Fame from the final line. Keats is gloomily realistic but unpitying. Talk about adversity: When Keats was nine his father died after falling from a horse. His grandfather, with whom the Keats children had gone to live, died the following year. When the future poet was fifteen his mother died of tuberculosis, and his brother Tom died eight years later of the same disease. By that time, Keats had also contracted TB, which would kill him in 1821 at age twenty-five. If anyone had an excuse to indulge in self-pity, it was Keats, though his family history was hardly unusual in early-nineteenth-century England.

 

And yet, when we read his letters, he often sounds like the family cheerleader. For Keats, happiness was almost a moral imperative. A taste of earthly Hell tests us, shriveling some of us into hard, spiky cinders, annealing others into strength and resilience. Among major writers Keats is a rarity. Like Chekhov, also trained in medicine and prematurely dead from tuberculosis, he is remarkably free of the writer’s curse: megalomania. I’ve often thought Keats in his renowned “Negative Capability” letter is expressing less a literary theory than a reflection of his own sensibility:

 

“[I]t struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

 

Here Keats is writing to his friend Charles Brown on September 30, 1820, aboard a brig bound for Italy where he would die five months later:

 

“I wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy even those pains which are better than nothing. Land and Sea, weakness and decline are great seperators [sic], but death is the great divorcer for ever.”

 

Keats was born on this date, October 31, in 1795 and died February 23, 1821.

 

[The quote from Johnson is taken from Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (1785).]