Resurrecting the Liberal Keats

...Instead, Motion documents the poet's developing conviction that his personal calling was to promote well-being by writing about liberty and wholeness, rather than by applying the merely palliative treatments of early medicine...

...In 1818 his long poem, Endymion, appeared...

...Motion plays up Keats' misogyny more than previous biographers, but the verse supports a deep ambivalence and unease...

...By the time you finish Andrew Motion's expansive book, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" will never again look like Romantic vagueness...

...Contemporary reviewers tended to be dismissive...

...Even if Keats had lived, he probably could not have earned enough to support a wife...

...The decline of a rural economy forced some to become servants, many more to seek employment in factories with inhumane working conditions, and countless others to join the underclass of thieves, footpads, prostitutes, and beggars...

...Motion argues that to understand it properly, its political implications must be taken into account: "The hero's digressive wanderings, and the various forms of writerly flexibility, are all aspects of a single, unwavering aim: to define a community which rejects the conditions of the present 'barbarous age,' which idealizes an antique sense of order, which is intensely 'liberty-loving,' democratic and untrammeled...

...But his health was deteriorating rapidly, and the personal conflicts involved with his love for Fanny began to drive him toward a crisis that would shortly overwhelm him...

...In addition, the money woes of his younger brother George, who had emigrated to the United States, kept him lending sums he could ill afford that depleted the estate meant to support all the Keats children...

...Born in 1795, he was the eldest sibling and had two surviving brothers as well as a sister...

...Two months later, she remarried...

...He was a flamboyant character whose outrageous acts attracted a number of writers...

...Most of those who panned Endymion when it was published were, indeed, Tories who rejected its ideals...

...A study this convincing and powerful is not one word too long for Keats' short, rich, troubled life...

...On the other hand, the tubercular Romantic poet is certainly a hot topic these days...

...School kept John away from some of these upsets, but by 1809 his mother was critically ill with tuberculosis and her 14-year-old eldest took it upon himself to nurse her...

...By the age of 24 he had already done what he set out to do as a poet...

...His politics appealed to Keats, and initially the recently freed editor encouraged him by publishing some of his early efforts...

...Following his death, she put on mourning clothes for three years, and she continued to wear the ring he had given her afterward...

...Too soon, however, Hunt's mercurial interest switched to another fledgling writer, Percy Bysshe Shelley...

...This he defined as the writer "being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after faith and reason"—in other words, without the spacey transcendence popular at the time...

...In fact, it galled the poet that literary success depended in part on a feminine readership...

...Most famously there is "La Belle Dame sans Merci," while "Lamia" tells the story of a mysterious bride who turns out to be a serpent...

...Some studies have suggested that Keats' guardian pushed him into apprenticing himself as an apothecary and physician's assistant...

...Her new husband soon showed himself improvident with money, and family inheritance squabbles reduced the Keats household's fortunes to a pittance...

...No previous study, for example, has cast such a cold eye on Keats' ambivalent reaction to women...

...Motion tells us that eventually she married another unlikely suitor, a Sephardic Jew, and the couple moved to the Continent...

...When he abandoned his work at Guy's Hospital, Keats introduced himself to Leigh Hunt, radical editor of the Examiner...

...After he became enamored of Fanny Brawne, he so resented love's power over him that some of his friends (and subsequently certain biographers) thought she had flaws that made her an unworthy choice...

...you will see it, rather, as a subtle assertion of a liberal poetic philosophy—humanistic and life-affirming...

...For all his prickliness, Keats was a lovable person...

...Now he is numero uno among lyric poets once more, as he was at our century's beginning...

...So I approached Andrew Motion's Keats (Farrar Straus Giroux, 612 pp., $35.00) with some trepidation...

...Despite his incarceration, or maybe because of it, he was able to vastly increase the Examiner'?, sales...

...As the author remarks dryly, such indicators show us "the limits to Keats' liberalism...

...In London, the government was burdened by King George Ill's fits of insanity, and appalled by the prospect of his foppish son's succession...

...His father died in a fall from a horse in 1804, and his mother, crazed by grief and still nursing her daughter, disappeared for a while...

...An impecunious, unhealthy young poet was hardly a catch for someone as attractive and high-spirited as Brawne...

...Her letters and the reminiscences of friends, though, show her to have been an uncommonly mature and courageous young woman...

...Across the English Channel the French Revolution had degenerated into chaos and given rise to Napoleon, who became a major threat to the British...

...Sent to prison for satirizing the Prince Regent, he decorated his cell with wallpaper that had rose trellises as its pattern and painted the ceiling sky blue, with clouds...

...He possessed everything Keats felt self-conscious about lacking: tall good looks, a university education, easy aristocratic manners, and sex appeal...

...Nor will anyone find support in this book for the contention that he quit it because he was too sensitive to withstand the grim scenes of early 19th-century hospitals...

...In Motion's view, there is no reason to believe that, had Keats survived, he would necessarily have continued to write so well...

...Male behavior only underlines the attitude...

...Even the constancy of "Isabella" is rather creepy, directed as it is toward a pot of basil concealing the head of her dead lover...

...Two of his light, melodious lyrics are still represented in many anthologies: "Rondeau" ("Jenny kissed me when we met...

...His childhood coincided with a particularly unstable period in public life...

...From all accounts, Keats' short life brimmed with suffering...

...The poet's personal upbringing was as unsettled as the times he grew up in...

...In 1819, drained by sorrow and frustration, the poet nevertheless managed to break through to the odes he is best known for: "Grecian Urn" and "To Autumn" hold in magnificent balance the tensions he had been working to capture in verse...

...One particularly harsh judgment mocked Keats for being a Cockney, and for not having a classical education...

...But even before this, the poor were finding life increasingly harsh...

...The rest of the year Keats spent nursing his brother Tom, who was dying of tuberculosis...

...and "Abou Ben Adhem...

...Yet, as Motion demonstrates, the adversities he experienced unquestionably toughened him into the strong, complex poet he became...

...Even in this century, critics often see the poem as somewhat moony and immature...

...Withdrawing into hurt resentment (quite unnoticed by his rival, who treated him generously and ultimately wrote the beautiful "Adonais" as a memorial), Keats began developing his own stern theory of "negative capability...

...Less than a year later, her death supplied him with several major themes for his later writing, among them a concern with the relationship between literature and healing, and the conviction that pleasure and pain were inseparable...

...Back when Modernism still reigned, the received wisdom of its pundits was that John Keats wrote great letters but his verse fell far behind...

...Hunt was also a poet...

...The British author, who not long ago produced an estimable life of Philip Larkin, knows how to sauce his portraits with postmodern acerbity without obscuring his admiration for his subjects...

...She allowed herself to fall in love and become engaged knowing this would almost certainly end in bereavement...

...Inconstancy is the leitmotif of the female there and in many other works...

...to show how they shaped the argument as well as the language of his work...

...Though Keats' reputation is today at one of its highest points, this biography makes the case that we still ignore aspects of his greatness...

...Motion is sure he truly valued the healing arts and chose this career himself...

...Scores of contemporary practitioners of the genre take him as a model, talk about "negative capability" and discuss his theories of imagination...

...The guardian who managed the monetary affairs of the four orphans taught them to consider their mother a loose, unstable woman...

...No wonder men like Keats longed for the classical pastoral existence so poignantly depicted in his "Ode on a Grecian Urn...

...Further proof of how pervasive his influence has become was provided at the height of this Christmas shopping season: A glossy two-page spread in the New York Times Magazine advertising some luxe product quoted his declaration, "I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination...

...Motion points out that in "The Eve of Saint Agnes" it is ambiguous whether Madeline welcomes Porphyro to her bed or is raped...

...As Motion says, we don't have enough information to determine whether or not this characterization was true...

...Reading his life, we wince for him with each new rebuff or setback...

...At the same time, Motion clearly wishes to resurrect the poet's "liberal beliefs...

...His personal story wrings the heart...

...Here we have a "Cockney," indeed, pugnacious and streetwise...

...Fortunately, Motion's new biography turns out to be a bracing antidote to popular culture's frequently sentimentalized view of Keats...

...The virginal youth has been replaced by one who tried to escape the snares of marriageable females of his own class by resorting to prostitutes...

...As one of his many intimates put it, he was someone who "would put himself to any inconvenience to oblige his friends...

...Nonetheless, its effect on the future poet was to make him distrustful of women, although he found himself powerfully attracted to them...

...Social unrest was inevitable when a series of crop failures drove up the price of food...