"The Burden of the Mystery"

...whole a bad friend or a good one —both make, in my judgment, equally strong cases...

...So compelling to Miss Ward is this picture —it is indeed the kind of story that should be true even if it isn't—that she thereafter alludes to it as simple fact...

...It was very effective...

...He too had to take on nakedly "the burden of the mystery" and make his own myth...

...In a society that notoriously rewards glib ephemeralities and neglects real merit, it is nice to see meritorious work so promptly honored...

...Still, at times her commentary is very impressive: on "Bright Star," on the last lines of "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and perhaps most memorably, her page on the face of Moneta in The Fall of Hyperion, which goes far to justify her whole approach...

...Without denying that Keats loved Fanny Brawne, I am more persuaded by Bate's picture of the man whose primary loyalty was to "my demon Poesy" and whose more passionate outbursts to Fanny are to be explained by the fluctuations of that primary relationship rather than the other way around...

...These images are richer in their effects than in their causes...

...One might find a little distracting the circling and eddying which Bate is given to, his numerous little departures from straight chronology to pick up and repeat a quotation from a later or earlier date...

...Both succeed also in not condescending to a genius whose career was over at 24...

...That two such admirable biographies of Keats should have been published at the same time is not quite a coincidence in view of Professor Rollins' definitive edition of the Letters in 1958 following his book The Keats Circle, which had contained much unpublished Keatsiana...

...Perhaps the evidence may be looked at both ways...

...Miss Ward characteristically finds the poet's desperate clinging to the image of Fanny Brawne the most affecting part of it...

...Miss Ward tends to offer readings of poems only when she has something of particular interest so say...

...An impression that remains from both books is the terror of Keats' last year...

...Miss Ward, however, tends to see his growth mainly as a personal victory in which Keats comes to accept himself as a man, whereas Professor Bate thinks mainly of Keats' astonishing development as a poet, made possible in the first place by his secure sense of self...

...I was struck by two further things...

...He wanted to die in the midst of them...

...Bate, on the other hand, reduces the whole matter to a footnote on anecdotes about the childhood of the poet...

...he said that in the first flush of maturity as he was finishing Hyperion...

...A few weeks before his death, Keats, who loved books, could not bear the sight of them...

...Keats did not say "I think I shall be among the English poets after my death" during this year...

...it is told," Miss Ward writes carefully at first, "when she [Keats' mother] fell ill and absolute quiet was ordered, John found an old sword and took up his post outside her door with the blade bared, forbidding anyone to enter...

...In general Miss Ward discerns the "lower" motive and explains things in terms of love, where Bate discerns the "higher" motive and explains them in terms of justice...

...But Bate pursues the matter more deeply, showing—it is a central point in his book—how courageously Keats doubled back on this belief to accept the full burden of self-consciousness as a Romantic (and in this sense, a modern) poet...

...Bate himself is aware of this penchant and defends it in his preface...

...and he too rose to the challenge by making the dilemmas brought on by self-consciousness the very subject of his poetry...

...I might add that I remember it from years ago in the college classroom...

...and an altogether admirable grasp of poetic technique...

...They stress his remarkable growth, not only into but in maturity...

...Miss Ward is likely to explain the crises in Keats' emotional life in terms of Fanny Brawne, his health, or his childhood memories of his mother, whereas Bate is likely to explain them in terms of Keats' artistic or intellectual conflicts...

...Miss Ward does not always sift the evidence as scrupulously as Bate does...

...Bate characteristically finds most disturbing Keats' turning against sympathy in his desperate misery...

...For the sake of dramatic effect, she may for instance convert hearsay into fact...

...On one of the more interesting contended points—whether Keats is referring to Fanny (Ward) or poetry (Bate) when he wrote during his final illness: "The very thing which I want to live most for will be a great occasion of my death"— I incline to Bate's interpretation...

...Miss Ward renders more dramatically the moment when Keats, having listened to his friends angrily disputing their literary opinions, is suddenly struck by "what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason...

...The other detail is even more strangely moving...

...The differences between these two books are more striking than the similarities...

...On some specific points of difference — whether Keats had syphilis or not, whether he contracted TB before 1819 or not, whether Charles Brown was on th...

...Indeed, Keats emerges as one of the poets of modern times most acutely and intelligently sensitive to the relation between dreaming and poetry, art and society, writing and doing...

...Miss Ward is, like Bate, a sophisticated biographer, but I can not help feeling that her approach prevents her from making sufficient allowance for the intensity with which a genius feels the compulsion to express himself, the degree to which his emotions are bound up with the responsibility of the burden he carries and the excitement of discharging it...

...They call attention to Keats' unusual openness to experience, his willingness to risk himself, his capacity for disinterestedness (i.e., his ability to think beyond his personal or egoistic self and thus to "remake" himself so rapidly...

...In the spectacle of Keats' intense protest against his fate, as I perceive it, pity was quite overbalanced by terror...

...Once...

...i.e., of the actualities and possibilities of justice in the way men really lead their lives...

...Reviewed by DAVID J. GORDON Department of English Hunter College Both of these fine new biographies decisively establish the image of a manly, energetic and robust Keats, and decisively quash the lingering image of a dreamy, indolent consumptive who didn't know the difference between beauty and truth...

...During his last year, having made an enduring contribution to English poetry, he said he would have made himself remembered if he had lived, and he asked that on his tombstone be inscribed: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water...

...Having read a passage aloud—from Johnson, Hazlitt or Arnold, as likely as not—he would be struck anew by its cogency and elegance, and would exuberantly read it again...

...There is nothing to regret, however...

...As Bate reminds us, a good poem tells us more about the poet's life than vice versa...

...These qualities are particularly evident in Bate's full readings of Keats' significant poetry...

...Nor is there any need to quarrel with the judges who honored Miss Ward's book with the National Book Award and Bate's with the Pulitzer Prize...

...Look here, Woodhouse," he wrote on the point of accepting an engagement, "I have a new leaf to turn over—I must work—I must read—I must write—I am unable to afford time for new acquaintances—I am scarcely able to do my duty to those I have...

...He wanted them all taken away and could not even bear to be read to...

...By temperament Keats retained a preference for the more classical and impersonal mode of Shakespeare, Milton and Greek sculpture, but in the year between Hyperion, his first great poem, and The Fail of Hyperion, his last, he had come to realize that for better or worse he stood with Wordsworth as a modern poet...

...It is the picture that I think prevails: the compulsions of genius just winning out over the inclinations of the social man...

...Keats first sided with Shakespeare and Milton against the Wordsworthian "egotistical sublime" and a poetry that "has a palpable design on us," a choice that could only have been strengthened by Keats' meeting Wordsworth and finding the man vain and bigoted, less noble than the poet...

...At times she even seems rather facile, as when she explains Keats' proclivity toward images of height as overcompensation for his short stature, or images of the sea as vestiges of childhood identification with an uncle who was a naval officer...

...His death at 25 was a tragedy as nearly senseless as a tragedy can be...

...an even more acute moral sense...

...Bate's more durable, if not quite as readable, book combines qualities which are not often found together: an acute psychological sense, impressive in its handling of the reader's reactions and of the legends blocking the reader's view as well as in its understanding of the mind of Keats and of the creative process...

...During his very last week, however, he made a sudden reversal, asking to be surrounded by books...