Happy Birthday, John Keats

Keats was born on this day in London, 1795. “Ode to Autumn” is perhaps my favorite of his – but today, for his birthday, I will post: “Ode on Melancholy”. And below the poem are a bunch of compiled quotes – from Keats and about Keats. He brings up strong reactions in people. Many adore, many think something is lacking … but all give him the props. I particularly love the quote I found from Robert Graves.

Ode on Melancholy

1.

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolfs-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

2.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

3.

She dwells with Beauty – Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

“One song of Burns is of more worth to you than all I could think of for a whole year in his native country. His Misery is a dead weight on the nimbleness of one’s quill … he talked with Bitches, he drank with blackguards, he was miserable. We can see horribly clear in the works of such a Man his whole life, as if we were God’s spies.” — John Keats on Robert Burns

“Shelley was a volatile creature of air and fire: he seems never to have noticed what he ate or drank, except sometimes as a matter of vegetarian principle. Keats was earthy, with a sweet tooth and a relish for spices, cream and snuff, and in a letter mentions peppering his own tongue to bring out the delicious coolness of claret. When Shelley in Prometheus Unbound mentions: “The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom”, he does not conjure up, as Keats would have done, the taste of the last hot days of the dying English year, with over-ripe blackberries, ditches full of water, and the hedges grey with old man’s beard. He is not aware of the veteran bees whirring their frayed wings or sucking rank honey from the dusty yellow blossoms of the ivy.” — Robert Graves

“On the whole, I do not like Keats. His poems are, in reality, too full of beauty. One feels stifled in roses … There is little in Keats’ poems except luscious beauty — so much of it that the reader is surfeited.” — L.M. Montgomery

“These are the pure Magic. These are the clear vision. The rest is only poetry.” — Rudyard Kipling on John Keats and Samuel Coleridge

“He’d planned to become a surgeon, but he realized his real vocation was poetry, and in the spring of 1818, he published his first major long poem Endymion. And then he set out on a hike through the countryside with his friend Charles Brown. Wordsworth was one of Keats’s favorite poets, and he knew that Wordsworth had been inspired by walking around England, so Keats decided to do the same that summer.

Keats was a London boy. He had never seen the mountains. He had never seen a waterfall. He wrote letters back to his brother about the wonderful things that he saw, but gradually on his hike he realized he was no Wordsworth, that he did not want to write about scenery. He hated descriptions. He was more interested in the people whom he saw along the way. He was fascinated by the peasants who walked barefoot on the roads, carrying their shoes and stockings so they would look nice when they got to town. He saw an old woman being carried along the road in a kind of a cage like a dog kennel, smoking a pipe.

He came back to London and learned that the reviews of his last book of poetry, Endymion, were coming in and critics had written ferocious attacks on him. He was crushed. And his brother had come down with a serious case of tuberculosis. His brother died in December, and by the end of that year, John Keats had contracted tuberculosis himself. He would die three years later, in 1821. It was in those last three years of his life that he wrote most of his greatest poems.” — Garrison Keillor

“He ramped through [Spenser’s[ Fairie Queen … like a young horse turned into a Spring meadow.” — Cowden Clarke, a friend of Keats

“The imagery he chose was predominantly sexual. Poetry for him was not a philosophical theory, as it was for Shelley, but a moment of physical delirium.” — Robert Graves

“… miserable self-polluter of the human mind.”– Shelley

“I look upon fine phrases as a lover.” — John Keats

“Keats as a poet is abundantly and enchantingly sensuous, but the question with some people will be, whether he is anything else.” — Matthew Arnold

“The three great narratives, rich in detail, idealized characterization, and gothic elements, inspired poets, painters and musicians later in the century. The Pre-Raphaelites in particular drew sustenance from them. ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ radically reconfigures resources of tone and characterization that Keats adapted from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet was not far from his hand when he wrote the poem. And his phrasing owes Shakespeare a debt. Cymbeline suggests the way Madeline’s bedchamber is made solid before our eyes. Keats does not imitate his masters: he has assimilated them. The odes – ‘To a Nightingale,’ ‘On a Grecian Urn’, ‘To Autumn’, and the lesser ‘To Psyche’ and ‘On Melancholy’ — are incomparable. The charge that he ‘lacked experience’ is fatuous; nor are they ‘merely sensuous’. They are the step beyond moral romance to the romance of feeling itself, feeling as subject, the ‘true voice’.” — Michael Schmidt, “Lives of the Poets“

“I have loved the principle of beauty in all things.” — John Keats

” … a sensuous mystic.” — Louis MacNeice

“Keats was short-sighted. He did not see landscapes as such, so he treated them as painted cabinets filled with interesting objects … His habit was to allow his eye to be seduced from entire vision by particular objects … He saw little but what moved: the curving, the wreathing, the slanting, the waving – and even then, it seems, not the whole object is in motion but only its edge, or highlight.” — Robert Graves

“Keats’s yearning passion for the Beautiful is not a passion of the sensuous or sentimental poet. It is an intellectual and spiritual passion.” — Matthew Arnold

“Milton had an exquisite passion for what is properly, in the sense of ease and pleasure, poetical luxury, and with that, it appears to me, he would fair have been content, if he could, so doing, preserve his self-respect and feeling of duty performed.” — John Keats

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 engraved on his Tomb Stone
“Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.”
— Keats’ epitaph

“Poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.” — John Keats

More on John Keats’ short life here