The story of John Keats is one of the best known lives
in literary history. His working class origins, poor critical
reception and tragically early death constitute a perfect blueprint
for a popular archetype of the Romantic Poet. The myth of Keats
as an unrecognised genius killed by savage criticism was fuelled
by his friends after his death and was one that appealed greatly
to the sentimentality of the Victorian reading public. The prevailing
image of Keats has, since his death, been that of a fragile victim
and of his poetry as deeply pretty yet intellectually flimsy.
What Andrew Motion feels that he can add to this already thoroughly
well documented history is made clear in his preface. He wants
to free Keats from the archetype of the Romantic victim, made
immortal by Shelley in his elegy ‘Adonais’. Keats, like Byron
and Shelley, has been given what Motion calls a ‘posthumous existence’,
a semi-fictional self that holds a powerful position within the
mythology of English poetry. Byron is the first great International
Playboy, Shelley the ‘ineffectual angel’, and Keats the troubled,
sickly aesthete. As Motion says, Keats has become ‘a byword for
the poetic identity….at once pathetic and sublime’.Motion’s
Keats promises to be more than a fragile, solipsistic dreamer
whose poetic concerns do not extend beyond flowery bowers and
revamped Greek mythology. His aim is that Keats should be reread
within the context of the early nineteenth century, its politics,
economics and popular culture. Keats, Motion argues, was a political
and social thinker who, whilst he never wrote explicitly polemical
poetry like Shelley and Byron, saw art and beauty as morally healing
and socially cohesive forces.
Motion’s aims are very much in line with the direction of
recent Keats scholarship which has seen critics such as Jerome
McGann, Nicholas Roe and Andrew Bennett make attempts to ‘historicise’
Keats and has led to suggestions that there are covert political
agendas lurking beneath the lush descriptiveness of the Keatsian
poetic. Motion’s biography attempts to elucidate and popularise
this ‘New Keats’ and in doing so performs a very important function
of the literary biography in bringing the current debates of academia
alive for a wider reading public. Thankfully, Motion avoids most
of the more extreme conclusions drawn by the New Historicist school
of criticism, although he is quick to acknowledge his debt to
their work. However, a main weakness here is that in attempting
to find a middle ground between Keats the swooning aesthete and
Keats the political animal, his argument is sometimes weak and
often inconclusive.
In the case of Keats’s famous ode ‘To Autumn’, Motion rejects
the New Historicist idea that the poem is ‘precisely concerned
with’ the Peterloo massacre and states that the poem is ‘ambitious
to transmutate or escape history’. Yet Motion is not keen to
dispel completely the claims of the New Historicists, and in the
next breath he is referring to and agreeing with several of the
minor points that go towards their broader objective. In other
words, Motion seems to be accepting the premises of the argument
whilst denying the conclusion. Whilst Motion quotes letters from
Keats that discuss contemporary politics and cites them as proof
of his ‘deep thinking about the historical process’, he ignores
their unmistakable political naivety and simplistic historical
view. As Keats himself wrote, ‘I know very little of these things’
and there is very little in his work to suggest otherwise.
Unlike literary criticism, literary biography cannot ignore
history. The historical and social context of any life are essential
to the telling of it. With this kind of biography, however, the
difficulty lies in finding a balance between a narration of the
facts and an analysis of the works, whilst avoiding the banality
of overly biographical readings of the poetry. It is in finding
this balance between Keats the man and Keats the poet that the
inconclusiveness of Motion’s arguments arises. When telling the
life of Keats Motion is strong and persuasive in his presentation
of a man who, far from being a weak and ineffectual victim, was
robust, determined and brave. He also presents a fascinating account
Keats’s circle of friends and a fair well-balanced account of
his family which resists the temptation to demonise his uncle,
Abbey, who has often been blamed for his financial ruin.
The book is lavishly illustrated with images of Keats and his
circle and pictures of many of his draft manuscripts. In keeping
with Motion’s aims, these serve both to historicise and to humanise
Keats. There is an ‘ambrotype’ or early photograph of his lover
Fanny Brawne taken some years after Keats’s death which, when
placed among the pencil drawings and Regency silhouettes, shocks
the reader into realising that Keats, even in his lifetime, stood
on the threshold of the Modern Age. Most fascinating, perhaps
are the photographs of Keats’s life and death masks. The first
shows all the lively tensions and fragile beauty of the young
poet’s face, the second that same face, ravaged by consumption
and collapsed in death. The comparison between the two depicts
the tragedy of Keats’s early death better than could any prose
account
Motion’s attempt to illustrate that tragedy through words is
admirable in its unstinting realism. Keen to dispel the romantic
myth surrounding the disease that killed Keats, Motion presents
consumptive death in all its painful horror. Moving as this section
of the book is, however, Motion’s prose is ill-referenced and
written with all the omniscient authority of a Victorian novel.
This flaw runs throughout the entire work as Motion recounts conversations
as if he had overheard them himself and too often refers to how
Keats ‘felt’ or what he ‘thought’ without allowing us to know
the sources of his insights. The text is littered with quotation
marks but few of these are accompanied by notes or attributions.
Quotes from Keats’s letters are undated, a grave mistake in a
life so short and emotionally intense that not only the year but
the month and week of writing are of enormous importance. Verse
citations are not line-referenced and the index is not as thorough
as one would wish for a volume of this length and scope.
Despite its shortcomings as a reference work, the book is a
powerful, thorough and meticulously descriptive work and Motion’s
love and enthusiasm for his subject is infectious. Unfortunately
this love makes him more than a little partisan and many of Keats’s
acquaintances, such as Hunt and Shelley come off rather badly
through Motion’s inability to concede any fault on the part of
his favourite Romantic. Keats remains the victim in this work,
though here the victim of fickle friends and a disloyal brother
rather than of the critics. However, the book does fulfills its
aims in that it presents a fresh picture of Keats to a new generation
of readers. Whilst it does not quite dispel the old archetype,
Motion’s book gives new life and energy to a figure that has
too long been fossilised in the static pantheon of the English
Canon and this is perhaps the most that a ‘literary life’ could
hope to achieve.
Reviewed by Polly Rance
