John Keats

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Available on all good podcast platforms. This is a clash of maps. The generals arrive with cartographers and their soldiers will type and copper plates to create ever larger attices. The prize, a new image of the world, and with it, vast wealth. I'm historian Jerry Brom to hear more about this story, remarkable people and the fascinating maps behind them. Subscribe to What's Your Map, an Oculimundi exploration. This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 1819 John Keats wrote some of the most loved poems in English, among them, Oads to a Nightingale and on Melancholy. Boyed up by enthusiastic friends, he'd left his medical career for poetry roughly two years earlier, though some published reviews called him an uncouth cockney who should have stuck to medicine. Two years later, Keats was dead from TB, before his work found wider glory, and some who knew him, including Shelley, believed his true killer, was the critics. With me to discuss John Keats, a Fiona Stafford, Professor of English Language and Literature and Tutorial Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford, Mako Halloran, Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature at the University of Newcastle, and Nicholas Row, Wardlaw Professor of English Literature at the University of St Andrews. Nick Rowe, can I start with you? Tell us something about Keats' family background and where that cockney epithet may have come from. Yes, his family background was based in the city of London. He was born there in late October of 1795, at the Swan and Hoop, livery stable, or near to there, on the city road at Moorfields. This was a busy livery stable. His parents were Thomas Keats and Francis Jennings. Thomas was a helper in the livery stable. Francis Jennings was the daughter of the leaseholder of the stable and his wife, John Jennings and Alice Wolley, and John Jennings was a wealthy man. He was also the master of the inholders guild. Besides John, Thomas and Francis had four other children, there was George, the second son, then Thomas, and then Edward, who didn't last very long, and their daughter, Francis, was born in 1803. That's a momentous year because John and George went off to school to the north of London at Clark's Academy at Enfield. 1803 is also significant because it was the year before their father, Thomas, died in a tragic riding accident. It left Francis Jennings without a husband and the Keats children without a father. Presumably, the financial stability came from the fact that Keats' mother was the daughter of a relatively wealthy leaseholder. That's exactly right, but there were problems, and Thomas's death initiated the breakup of the family and a long-running struggle between Francis Jennings, her parents, and her brother, who was called midgly John Jennings. John Jennings left the majority of his fortune, which was over £12,000, a very substantial sum at the time. To his wife, Alice, he left a very considerable sum to his son, midgly John, but he left only an annuity of £50 per year to his daughter, Francis Jennings. So there was going to be financial instability or recurring theme during Keats' life. Fiona Stafford, where did Keats go to school? It wasn't Eden or Harrow, was it? But they were clearly able to afford a decent education. Yes, he was at the Enfield Academy, which was run by a man called John Clark, who was a liberal and inspiring teacher, I think. So Keats, by our standards, had a good education. He's often caricatured as being uneducated, because, as you say, he didn't go to Eden like Shelley, he didn't go to Harrow like Byron. But he did have a good education. And it was also an education, which wasn't just bookish. He was also encouraged to look up at the stars and look at the natural world, have a curiosity about the world around him. But he was also, I mean, he was taught Latin, so when he was at school, he translated the whole of Virgil's in the year, which is quite a feat. I think we can be quite impressed by that. So this idea of him somehow being working class and not educated is just really far from the truth. He goes on to study medicine, but he gives up his medical career in 1860. Why does he do that? Well, he gives it up, I think, because he realizes what a good poet he is, and he's meeting other poets, and he's just incredibly excited by the whole idea of poetry. He's a very passionate reader of poetry. I think I can't think of, can't think of anyone in the cannon who is so excited about reading. So he keeps his real lover of poetry, and he has a real gift for it. But I mean, he did work hard as a medical well. I think that's another thing that people often don't realise. He passed his medical exams, a lot was involved with that. So he could have practises on apothecary or a surgeon, but instead he decides he's going to be a poet. And what does he take from those medical studies into his poetry? Well, I think quite a lot, especially his, well, for example, his pharmaceutical training, which would have been part of his qualification to be an apothecary. The apothecary is acted just past in 1815, so it was a moment where medicine was really tightening up, and people were having to be more accountable. And part of the training was to take walks on Hampstead Heath and go and look at the flowers, which seems a bit odd to us, until we remember that at this time they had no penicillin. So most of the remedies that were being kind of prescribed by the apothecaries were basically dried flowers. So you really had to know your flowers. There were some awful cases where people, you know, children had been given colts for, although they were supposed to be having colts for a bad cough. And actually they were given dried fox glove leaves, which killed them. So, you know, there are some really important aspects of his medical training, which you then see in his poetry, because he's so very specific about, about plants. So that would be one example of what he took from his medical training, and you find it informing his poetry is very good on poisonous plants. So in this early stage, Meiko, can you tell us who was supporting encouraging kites in developing his poetry? Primarily his friends and his brothers. And I would really want to emphasize his fraternal ties with Tom and George, his two younger brothers, who provide a profound emotional and psychological comfort to kites. They had been buffeted about. They'd had a lot of experience of bereavement in their childhood, because his mother has died as well. That's right. Relatively early on. Yes, his mother dies when kites is about 14, and the kites children then going to live with their grandmother. And kites and his brothers rent a lot of lodgings all around London. And the 1817 collection of poems, Kites's first published collection, gives us some helpful insights into who else has been supporting kites up to that point. And they include Charles Cowden Clark to whom Kites addresses an important verse epistle. And Cowden Clark was the son of the headmaster John Clark and had encouraged Kites and had introduced him to all sorts of works of literature. And that poem, Kites celebrates the epic poetry that he's been reading with Clark, Milton, Spencer, Tassau. He also recognizes Clark's influence in introducing him to the ode, the sonnet, the epic. And all these works that he feels have enriched his life. And then more strategically, Kites is also positioning himself in that volume of 1817 his first collection of poems with Lee Hunt, who was a recent supporter of the poem. of Keats and had published one of his early poems on first looking into Chapman's Homer and really brought Keats into public attention by introducing him as one of three brilliant young poets from whom great things would be expected and the other two happened to be Percy Bischelli and John Hamilton Reynolds who becomes a close friend of Keats too. Leigh Hunt was something of a radical. Did that affect Keats' politics, his understanding of London society, British society at the time? Yes, absolutely. So Leigh Hunt was the hero of liberty in lots of ways. He had gone to prison for libeling the Prince Regent in his weekly paper, which he ran with his brother, the examiner, and Keats had grown up reading that in his boyhood at Clark's Academy and Hunt is a kind of hero to Keats in that early stage and represents a radical thinking and independence of thought. So one of the poems that Keats, I mean he actually dedicates the volume of 1817 to Hunt. He also writes a poem celebrating the day on which Leigh Hunt was released from prison and one of the things Keats admires is that Leigh Hunt, despite being in prison, had not been constrained in his imagination. He still managed to fly with Milton through sort of the fields of air and that independence of thought and liberty are so important to Keats. Nick Rowe, can you tell us a little bit about his tour of Scotland, a four-month tour of Scotland? Yes, he made a tour of Scotland in the summer of 1818 with his friend Charles Armitage Brown, who he'd met in the summer of the previous year. In the spring of 1818, Keats had been looking after his brother Tom in Timoth down in Devonshire, Tom was ill with pulmonary tuberculosis and it seems that over this spring Keats started to have the idea of making a tour of the north, with some thought of gathering imagery, scenery towards an epic poem that he was contemplating. The poem eventually became Hyperion and Bico incidents his brother George, who had recently married a girl called Georgiana Wiley, was planning to emigrate to America. They were able to combine their trips to the north, Georgian Georgiana to Liverpool, where they were going to take their boat across the Atlantic and then John and Charles Brown were going to continue up through the lake district where they failed to meet Wordsworth and didn't climb Hellvelling and made it halfway up Skidaw. But he was very taken with everything he saw, the lands he was extremely taken by, for example, Stockgill force above Ambleside. He thought, improved his ideas of the sublime and they then went on through the Burns country, a quick dip over to Northern Ireland and back, on up to Burns's birthplace at Allaway and then out to the western Isles to Mull, Tiaiona to Stafford, where they went into Fingles Cave, up north towards the Great Glen, where they climbed Ben Nevis and then on up to Inverness where on a doctor's advice Keats opted to take a coastal ship at smack back to London and it was a tour that was productive in poetic terms. Do you have any of that? The satirical piece which is upon my life Sir Nevis, I am peaked, which is a kind of satirical dialogue between Ben Nevis and the Mrs C, sweet Nevis, do not quake for though I love your honest countenance or things above, truly I should not like to be conveyed so far into your bosom. But the sonnet that he wrote read me a lesson muse and speak it loud upon the top of Nevis, blind in mist. I look into the chasms and the shroud vaporists that hide them, just so much I wished mankind do know of hell. I look her head and there is sullen mist, even so much mankind can tell of heaven. Fionne, so he's having the surge of creativity around the the tour to Scotland, but comes home a little prematurely to find his brother Tom dying of TB. What impact does that have? Absolutely huge impact. As Mako was saying he was very close to his younger brothers, I think having lost their parents, John felt a particular responsibility for them and also as a trained doctor. He gets back to Hampstead, he finds Tom really in the final stages of tuberculosis, consumption as they would have called it and he nurses him and it is an absolutely harrowing part of his life. But out of that comes an extraordinary surge of creativity. It's very very strange and you know lots of people think of different reasons for why this could have occurred and we don't really know, but the following spring, I mean this is this is the December 18 18, Tom dies on the 1st of December and already by within a few months, Keats is pouring out the poems that he's best known for. So we have the Eva St. Agnes, then we have this extraordinary sequence of Ode, the Ode to a Nightingale, the Ode on a Gratian Earn, the Ode on Malancholy, and a Baldom Somersi, plus some stunning sonnets as well. And they're just all pouring out of him. So it is a very extraordinary sequence of being absolutely at his lowest in a way. And then out of that comes this creativity. I think it's to do with the intensity of the feelings. He has all that energy and all those new experiences that he has in Scotland and in the north, he'd never seen mountains before. So he's got suddenly he's seen the sublime first hand and then there he is. He kind of cooped up in this in the sick room in Hampstead and it's all dark and it's terribly unhealthy. It's probably where he contracted the disease that was going to kill him very soon afterwards. But some of this seems to just kind of come together in this in this great, great explosion. And this is where he met Fanny Braun. So can you give us a couple of lines from one of your favourite sonnets or Ode's from that great year of creativity? Yes, I would have to choose the Ode to a nightingale and I think the way the poem finishes is so very Keatsian because it doesn't end with a conclusion, it ends with with a question and we don't quite know what to make of it. It's only just ends. Was it a vision or a waking dream? Flood is that music? Do I wake or sleep? Make a you wanted to come in there? I think I would have to choose some lines from the end of Ode to Syke. Yes, I will be thy priest and build a fame in some untrodden region of my mind where branched thoughts new grown with pleasant pain instead of pines shall murmur in the wind. Thank you and I really liked Ode to Syke as well. I thought it was a super poem, really did. It's also really extraordinary the formal spectrum from incredibly complex forms to actually quite simple forms and also in terms of subject matter as well. And he was trying different things, wasn't he? There's a couple of months, January 1818, where you look at what he was writing and the change of mood, he's writing a poem to Mrs Randall's cat and then he's writing a sonnet on sitting down to re-King Lear again. I mean the shift in register and form is extraordinary. Yeah, yeah. He starts out with spencearian stanzas, a very difficult form to master. He writes an imitation of Spencer, comes back to the form in the eve of St Agnes writing a narrative romance in about 40 stanzas. Apparently in a very few days it's an astonishing achievement. That's an incredible thing as well. He doesn't seem to have spent days and months bent over 14 lines. You know, they seem to come out in a couple of days. Yeah, it's less than that. I mean, Ode to Nightingale's supposed to be just sort of sit down and write it's in about three hours. I mean, I don't know that's true. I think that's significant. In the sense that he seems to write at his best in a single effort, a single creative outpouring for one of a better word. But when, for example, with his epic project in Hyperion, he was attempting to write that in the autumn of 1818 and being interrupted, understandably by his poor brother Tom who was dying. He found it very difficult to pick up the creative momentum again and bring the poem to completion, which arguably is one reason, as well as his sense that he was too close to Milton's manner in Paradise Lost. I think it was something much closer as well to his patterns of composition and how he wrote at his best in one sustained push of creativity. There's a quite an emphasis on mortality in some of the poems. Is he already considering his own mortality? Well, he was considering it even a year before that. He rights is on it when I have fears that I may see Ili yr Maybellfa Canadian mynd barn dra'n pLouwn na fwy edry持wOL, i chi wed pylem y play am wackar. Mae'n amser amherでしょう waail'io ikot, py Twirlio moio porraeth am ddod eiffnaethau'n ddweudauimdi. Mae modder. Mae rei amser roedd fa cantlooląig a hi'rσαth ddaedau dimi amser dd Classgarigervoluaodau. A4 ambyn ceriedd yn welded ymain 'dsual Mengação' submit WOMAN Zhash Phut Bywch yn gone Bäunt firmy Soundd Thous кар cent Mae'er rwyth pan hip It'spg It's a lot of work This is a clash of maps The generals arrive with cartographers and their soldiers wield type and copper plates to create ever larger attresses The prize, a new image of the world and with it vast wealth I'm historian Jerry Brom to hear more about the story remarkable people and the fascinating maps behind them subscribe to what's your map an oculeumundi exploration available on all good podcast platforms Thank you no Sherlock Holmes this is the full case file all 60 stories brought to life by BBC Radio 4 with a cinematic cast and edge of your seat storytelling footprints footprints a man's or a woman Mr Holmes they were the footprints of a gigantic hound start listening to Sherlock Holmes the complete BBC collection wherever you get your audiobooks Mico one of the forms that Keats was fascinated by was epic poetry why was that? That's right Keats had inherited a model of poetic progress from Virgil via Spencer and Milton in which poets would begin their apprenticeship work in the pastoral genre so they would write poems about leisure pleasure sensuous delight in pastoral settings and then they would work their way up to the ambitious genre of the epic and that's what you would do when you were a mature poet and at the height of your powers so that's when Milton composes his paradise lost Audente his divine comedy Keats was attempting epic poetry at the age of 22 and I think it is because exactly as Fiona says he feels this compression of time and having lost Tom so such a young age he's more aware than ever that he may have a limited amount of time in which to compose his epic poetry so he does leap from well his last published work was in Dimmie in a pastoral romance into Hyperion which is an extraordinary attempt at epic he makes two attempts at epic poetry either they actually kind of bookend what we now think of as his living year the year in which he writes all the poems that he's most famous for and the 20th century critic Robert Gittings actually dates it very precisely to the 21st of September 1818 to the 21st of September 1819 an extraordinary outpouring of poems and the first they begin and end with two epic fragments so Keats intended these works to be longer and in the first Hyperion fragment he slows down and he uses blank verse he had been using rhyming couplets before hence the lot of the critics say it's the Cockney rhymes you know that's one of the associations with Keats's previous poetry but he uses blank verse which is unrhymed iambic pentameter the verse form that Milton uses and Paradise Lost it's what words with uses and the prelude and he really examines suffering he is working his way towards writing about Apollo the Olympian successor to Hyperion who becomes the god of the sun and of healing and of poetry so the poet healer that Keats admires and taking forward that medical sort of identity and his name. Almost as though he identified with Apollo himself. Yes, he actually really does reveal Apollo and writes a lot of poems about Apollo lead up to this. So he wants to explore the ascension of Apollo but what he finds is that he's so imaginatively immersed in the desolate and bewildered condition of the fallen titans, the predecessors to the Olympian gods that he spends most of the fragment elucidating their sorrow. I was struck in advance of this program I read quite a lot of his poetry. I was struck how some of them are very, very romantic with a small r. There was a particular poem to a lady seen for a few moments in voxel, wonderfully prezeic title, about how he saw somebody five years ago fell in love with her and he saw her for five minutes but constantly thinks of her ever since then and some of the other poems are extremely intense in his in his affection yet we don't hear that much about his personal life. What was his personal life like, his love life? Well, there's still quite a bit of mystery about some aspects of it. There's a woman called Isabella Jones, for example, who he met and maybe the inspiration for his poem Isabella but it may just be that he liked reading Baccatio. It's really quite difficult to tell. He was susceptible to women but I mean, he lets things slip in his letters. He says he sometimes has, you know, bad thoughts about women. So there is quite a mystery but we do know that he fell in love with Fanny Braun in Hampstead and this was the young woman. She was quite a lot younger than him. She was only 18. They became engaged towards the end of that. Anna Smarabola. And there are people who think that it was because he fell in love with Fanny Braun that he wrote all those wonderful oeds. Again, there's lots of discussion about it but we don't have much evidence. And the woman you're referring to who he saw in Voxel Gardens. We don't know who she is. You know, it's one of those great, great mysteries. But I mean, he did say early on that actually he was so attached to his brothers that he has a stronger feeling for them than he could ever have for a woman. So that sort of family feeling is really, really deep. But then I think one of the difficulties is that he wrote lots of letters. He had lots of friends who we've been we were hearing about. And he sort of dashes things off often when he's had a drink or whatever. And then scholars of the later year pour over all of these letters and construct things from them. I mean, because we just don't always have the evidence. They are a useful resource, those letters, aren't they? Because he was pretty good at keeping letters and he wrote a lot of letters. He wrote a lot of letters and other people kept them as well. And they are absolutely wonderful letters. I mean, I think people who only know his poetry actually really miss out. I think he's just a brilliant letter writer and you really get to sense of his personality and his friendships because he has a slightly different tone depending on whether he's writing to his brothers or whether he's writing to John Hamilton Reynolds. And it's where a lot of our ideas about what he thought about poetry come from. Because a lot of the letters are talking about poetry to fellow poets. And this is where he coins the term negative capability or when he's talking about axioms in philosophy and not axioms until he fill them on the pulses. Lots of those things that we think of as quintessentially Keats and then we read into the poems. Coming from his private correspondence. So it's a wonderful, wonderful resource. So Nick, he has this incredibly productive year. He's only about 23, 24 years old. What does the outside world make of his poetry? The outside world had not made very much of his poetry up to that point because his 1817 collection, which he'd put together late in 1816 and over Christmas of that year, only reached a few dozen readers who were his friends as he put it. And a few dozen readers who weren't his friends and didn't like the book. So literally you could count the number of readers perhaps in terms of dozens. In Dimmian, which appeared in April of 1818, his poetic romance, certainly reached some readership, but it was very widely criticised and in very hostile terms in the leading journals of the day, the Blackwoods magazine, where the Cockney School essays started to appear, and in the quarterly review, where Croca admitted to only reading the first canto of the poem, no more of the poem, a brazenly admires. admitted as much and then said he couldn't understand the poem at all. So it didn't actually reach many readers, although as one might expect, his publishers weren't downcast because they understood that adverse criticism could also sell the book. So by the time he reaches his year of great productivity and great poems, 1819, he was certainly known to the public, but as what I suppose you could call a risky prospect. Certainly James Hesse, one of his publishers, thought that her Keats was somewhat unreliable, but hope that he would do something eventually. So Fienne, what was the substance of these criticisms of Keats? Well the tax on endimian were really very, they were pretty brutal. You read them now and you just think, "Awesome, amazing, he ever wrote anything again," which I think actually makes that flowering in 1819, just a few months after it was even more remarkable. I suspect that's partly sort of proving what he can do as he retreats, wounded from these awful, awful reviews. But as Mika said, they're attacking his rhymes. They thought it was an incomprehensible poem. I think one of the very sort of unfortunate errors he made was to publish a preface with it, which was basically saying, "Well I don't think it's actually very good, but I'm better." I mean that is not a very, not a very strategically sensible thing to do when you've got a very, very hostile press out there. And so everybody just went for it really. It was a sort of almost invitation for open seas and it's very unfortunate. But they were also attacking the person rather than the poem a lot at the time. Yeah. Well, one of the nastiest ones was by John Locke Art. He really should have known better. He's one of the. What have he had in Brawitz? And he really goes for Keats being lower class and apothecary. I'm sort of saying, well why did he give up this useful job? And it ends up, you know, back to your potions and pills, Mr Keats, because at least you'd be doing the Wilson Good that way. So it's very, very unkind and it is partly politically motivated. It's because they know that Keats has associated with Lee Hunt. They don't like his politics. So there's a sort of right wingish press having a go at him for those reasons. But I think there are also aesthetic reasons as well that they don't like the poem and also they found it very hard to follow. And Mecha, has there been a revision of Endimian? Do people now regard it actually as a rather good piece of work or from a literary point of view, is it seen as a bit of a failed attempt on his part? Endimian does have some admirers, but I would say that they're a fairly niche group. On the whole, Endimian, as Keats himself recognises, is a kind of experiment that fails. So when Keats looks back on Endimian a year after composing it, he, so he composes it in 1817 and then by the autumn of 1818, when he thinks about it, he says that it was like leaping into the sea and discovering where all the rocks are. That it's an exercise he set himself. He's always aspired to write long poems. So he said would be a test of invention and he's feeling his way through this long poem, but he says that it's better to try and fail than not try at all. So he recognises that he's maybe, it's not his best work. And he does want to be taken more seriously, which is why he leaps into Hyperion. With the Oads and the Sonnets of 1818, 1819, was there any recognition at the time that these were truly great works? Well, the poems of this extraordinary flourishing in 1819, the fruits of that are all collected in his final collection of poems of 1820. So that's Lamiya, the eviscent agnus and Isabella and other poems. And the reviews come out quite late, so Keats sadly is not able to bask in the more positive attention that it draws. But even some of Keats' worst critics, who include Lord Byron, who had been very rude about Keats' poetry and in his private letters, he's sort of saying that in dimming his like mental masturbation, it's sort of schoolboy fantasy shared in this really inappropriate embarrassing, nauseating way. Even Lord Byron sort of recognises in the volume of 1820, which finishes with Hyperion a fragment that this is a work that is a monument that will keep Keats' name. Why does he decide to travel to Rome in 1820, Nick Rowe? What was his hopes? He traveled to Rome because he was seriously ill. He'd been suffering from tubercular symptoms. I think we can probably say throughout 1819. And in January 1820, Fanny Braun tells us Keats experienced his first hemorrhage from his lungs. She dates it to late January of 1820 and there were other hemorrhages throughout the spring. And clearly, although Keats' doctors had what they called the best hopes of him, that his condition was getting worse. So that by the late summer, August of 1820, it seemed best for him to go to Rome and try to pass the winter there in the warmer climate, which was thought to be beneficial for tubercular patients. He'd met a doctor in London, Dr. Clark, who was resident at Rome. And when Keats arrived there, having undertaken the long sea voyage from London to Naples with his friend Joseph Seven the painter, they arrived at Rome eventually in November. And it was Clark, who had arranged for apartments next to the Spanish steps in the Piazza di Spania. And Keats and Seven were resident there throughout the winter. And as I've said already, their fallon hope was that Keats would get better. And although he rallied occasionally, the course of his illness was relentlessly for the worse. But Shelley, he does write a kind of kind letter to Keats saying, you know, when you get to Italy, come and stay with us. So Shelley's actually really affected by Keats' illness, because Shelley's been out in Italy for quite a while and is really shocked. And then when Keats starts, he writes Adonias, which is a kind of very elaborate allergy for Keats, which has a lot to do with Keats' success in the Victorian period. Actually, I mean, rather makes, because Shelley very much sort of takes the line that Keats has been killed by the critics, which Byron is very scornful of, you know, to strange the mind. That very fiery particle should let itself be snuffed out by an article. It's Byron, it's not very sympathetic response to that. But Shelley's horrified by Keats' death. And Byron is as well, actually, when it actually happens, he's very embarrassed. Yes, Adonias is certainly highly influential over the long term in the 19th century, particularly when the Cambridge Apostles, Halem, Richard Munkton, Mellon's Tennyson, others as well put Adonias back into print in 1829. And when he dies, how does news of his death spread or is his death ignored? He died on the late in the evening of the 23rd of February, and Joseph Seven had nursed him through the last very harrowing days of his illness. And it took a little while for Seven to gather himself and write to London, which he did eventually in the letter to Charles Browne, Keats' close friend, with whom he'd been living in the last months of his life in Britain. And the letter arrived there, I think I'm right in saying, on Saturday the 10th of March. Certainly around then, Brown, of course, had been expecting the news, but was devastated when it arrived. He eventually told Fanny Braun and her mother what had happened. Brown also informed Keats' publisher, John Taylor, and asked him to place a notice in the London papers, giving the outline details of the death of John Keats, the poet, at Rome. And as was the practice at the time, other London newspapers copied the announcement, as did the provincial newspapers, and so the news spread. So that moment of his death enhanced his reputation without people necessarily having read the poems? That I think is true. Miko Halloran, how important has Keats' vulnerability been to his lasting reputation? Because of course there's the romantic idea associated with the early death of the poet, but also he was very open himself. Yes, he was open, I would say, to a fault almost. We heard earlier from fear about the extraordinary preface to endimian in which he diagnoses his own condition as being immature and really undeveloped as a poet. But by the time he comes into his extraordinary flourishing during his living year of poetry, he's able to use it. that vulnerability in extraordinary ways to access states of being and to inhabit characters so unlike his own experience. For example, on the back of what Fee was saying about the letters, a really important idea to emerge from the letters in that autumn of 1818 is the chameleon poet who, well, so this is Keats's way of defining his own particular kind of poetry and he explains that unlike what he calls the words 'worthy' in egotistical sublime, he's a poet who feels that he has no intrinsic identity of his own. He's forever, he says, fulfilling or filling an entering into these different characters and modes of being and he goes on to say in that letter that it's a quality a creative mode that enables a poet to celebrate high and low rich and poor to create a new argo or an imagines or villain or a heroine. It's a poetry that has no moral agenda, it's not guided by a particular philosophy but it also does leave the poet vulnerable as well because the chameleon poet and Keats goes on to say that it's an instinctive ability, it's not something that he can control. But in his poetry of 1818 and 1819 we see that gift used to in extraordinary ways, that all sorts of amazing moments and Keats's poetry where he imagines what it's like for, doesn't even have to be human, it's sort of like a little puff of smoke dyes in the evocent agnas or the icy statues as deemed to be croning and have this uneasy sense of life and he uses that in high period and the fall of high period. Nick Rowe, he of course didn't experience recognition much during his lifetime but over the 19th century that changed with the publication of biographies and so on. Can you explain when the turning point was, yes, the recognition of Keats? His 1820 volume was in fact well received, Taylor and Hessie's legal advisor, a Keats collector called Richard Woodhouse thought that the volume placed Keats with Shakespeare. During the 1820s, that's really remarkable. That's very prescient in some senses as well for the rapid ascent of Keats' fame. There were a lot of tribute poems written to him during the 1820s. In the 1830s, 1836 at Plymouth, Charles Brown gave a lecture on Keats, which was the first section of his projected biography and also put on an exhibition of what we'd call Keatsiana at the Plymouth Athenaeum, a copy of Seven's miniature, the Medallion depicting Keats and one or two other things. But Brown never completed his biography and handed the manuscript of it plus his collection of Keats transcript to Richard Monkton Mills, poet, politician who put together such materials as he could gather in the 1840s. There was quite a lot, manuscripts, transcripts, the letters and he published his biography and the life letters and literary remains of John Keats in 1848. Giving us a life narrative, some poems he the two unpublished, including the ode to indolence and of course the letters which were a revelation. So this really is the crucial turn. So by the end of the, by the second half of the 19th century, he has become a really major figure in English poetry. Fiona, as a final question, how do we account for Keats' popularity being so enduring? I think that's very easy. The poems are so good, though that absolutely perfect poems, Keats that is best, is just so astonishing. You can read the Oads over and over again and just be absolutely, have your breath taken away by how powerful they are, how beautiful they are. So I think it is, you know, just sheer quality. Well that's a great recommendation to end the programme. My thanks to Mako, Halloran, Nick Rowe and Fiona Stafford. Next week from potatoes to smallpox, the plants, animals and diseases that spread from continent to continent after 1492. That's the Columbian Exchange. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests. What did we miss out? I think if we'd have more time, we could have talked about the impact of the Elgin Marbles, for example, on things which is absolutely massive and also quite interesting to listen to Elgin Marbles. Well, the Elgin Marbles were on display for the first time in the British Museum and Keats used to go and just marvel at them really. He went with his friend, the artist, Benjamin Robert Hayden, and he writes, Keats writes, "Who's on it's about the Elgin Marbles and how overwhelmed they are." But also they then, I think, they're like kind of frozen figures. They're so lifelike, you can't believe it. And they inform Hyperion and the Evisant Agnes, I think. I don't know what anyone else thinks about that, but I think Elgin Marbles are quite important to Keats. Yes, they certainly are. And when he visited them in March of 1817, they became a kind of ideal of artistic achievement against which he measured his own possible attainment. And at that moment in his life felt somewhat lacking and not up to the kind of pinnacle represented by the art of classical Greece. Yes, I think that it also brings us to thinking about the unfinished and seeing things in fragments which almost leave more to the imagination. And Keats is fascinated by that sense of brokenness or incompletion. And I think that also invites us to think about Keats' own life being cut short and his sense of unfinished business, of his never fully achieving the the arc that he, the ambitious kind of arc that he sets out for himself. We need to mention also the significance of Tennyson's poetry. Poems chiefly lyrical, which I think is 1830, certainly around that date, which is saturated with Keats' language and imagery and rhythms and poetic names, this kind of thing. And Keats' reputation develops along with Tennyson's during the 1830s and 1840s. And it's arguably Tennyson who helps familiarize the reading public with a kind of Keatsian idiom for poetry. So that, as it were, compliments the influence of what Shelley had done in Adonais. Well, before we get off at a cup of tea or coffee by the producer Simon, let me ask you one final question that interests me. He was obviously influenced by a range of classical writers and poets. Did he have any engagement with contemporary European poetry and literature or was he very very English in that sense? I was going to say very English actually. I think you don't get much reference to French or German poets Italian. I'm his Dante, but not contemporaries. No, I mean contemporary. Yeah. He knew about composers, he knew about Hayden, he knew about Mozart, but his knowledge of European literature would be from the classics and from the Italian poets of the 13th and 14th century. Dante, obviously, is a real hero. But in translation, he's reading a carous translation of Dante on the walking tour. Yes. Yes. But then closer to Homer, I think, you know, one of the poets he thinks a lot about is a near contemporary, well, from the first generation of romantic poets, his wordsworth. His wordsworth is so important to Gees. And in his letter of the third of May to Reynolds in which he's sorry, 1818, in which he's thinking about what it takes to create great poetry, he compares Milton and Wordsworth. And he says that what Milton doesn't do is think into the human heart in the way that Wordsworth does. So I think that sense that Wordsworth is slightly ahead of him in being willing to go into these dark spaces of the human mind, progressing through what he says is a kind of mansion of many apartments, a kind of analogy of life in which we move from the infant chamber of thought to a maiden chamber of dawning awareness of pain. And then lots of dark passages. And that's where he feels that Wordsworth is ahead of him. And in that space, it's sort of sense of clouded vision and uncertainty. And it's a kind of further thinking through of negative capability of that state of being in mystery, uncertainty, doubt, without any irritable reaching after fact. Or reason that he'd been exploring earlier in 1818. Yeah. And some of it's very dark indeed. You know, ode to a nightingale, which I thought was, you know, just sort of lyrical, I read it and I thought, he's going into some really, really strange places here. Simon. Tea for me. Coffee would be lovely. Thank you very much. Thank you. In our time with Misha Glenny is produced by Simon Tilletson and it's a BBC Studios production. I'm Melanie Jones. And I'm Mark Kermode. And in screenshot we guide you through the ever-changing landscape of the moving image. I really like any story about self-delusion. My intent is to allow the audience to see the shining through these people's eyes. Meeting those on both sides of the camera. And uncovering fascinating insights into what we watch. 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