John Keats: The Major Works

"Ah yes, Keats. The young Romantic poet upstart who, like Shelley, did not survive his twenties. It’s enough to make you weep to think that Shelley had a volume of Keats’s latest volume of poems in his shirt pocket the day he drowned off the coast of Italy, desolating Mary Shelley. Unlike the other Romantics, who were either grammar-school boys or aristocrats, Keats came essentially from nothing. At fourteen, he left school and apprenticed to an apothecary. But his mind was a sponge for poetry—Spenser and Shakespeare in particular—his ambition was relentless, and his talent simply prodigious. By twenty-four he was dying, so his poetic output is extraordinarily compressed. 1819 was Keats’s annus mirabilus , in which he wrote his famous Odes: to the Grecian Urn, the Nightingale, etc. But he also wrote the sumptuous ‘Eve of St. Agnes’, which I introduce to my students as ‘the most beautiful poem in the English language.’ Even the ones sleeping off a hangover tend to perk up at that. English literature instructors rarely promise to show off the sheer beauty of the great poems anymore, which is a shame. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Now, ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ truly is a romance, small ‘r’, with a plot closely resembling Romeo and Juliet . The St. Agnes part is crucial: harking bark to medieval times, Keats picks up on a superstition that young virgins who follow certain abstemious rituals on the eve of St. Agnes’s day will dream of their future husband. Such is the plan of our heroine, Madeline, who is in love with Porphyro, scion of a rival house. But Porhpyro’s plans are different. His heart “on fire” for Madeline, he breaks into the castle to snatch Madeline both from her family but also from the icy grip of St. Agnes’s spell. Without exactly asking, he makes love to the dreaming Madeline, who wakes to find him in her arms. She is shocked and afraid, but he reassures her, and they escape from the castle together. Now, even this brief plot summary shows how explosive this poem is in terms of today’s gender politics. Is Porphyro a date rapist, or Madeline’s true dream lover? The problem for the rape argument is that Keats believes very strongly in his hero and “the holiness of the heart’s affections” (as he once put it in a letter), and he has set the trap for the reader accordingly. To denounce Porphyro is to embrace St. Agnes and her mind-minions of chastity. And who wants that? ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ is a very sexy poem, too hot for some to handle. In this most erotic of Romantic poems, even a description of supper sounds like sex: Candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd; With jellies soother than the creamy curd, And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon; Manna and dates, in argosy, transferr’d From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one, From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon. The Dover Thrift edition of English Romantic poetry has a good selection of shorter Romantic poems, but does not include Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion or, of course, Byron’s Don Juan . For these I would recommend the Oxford World’s Classics editions of these two poets, which are excellent. Well, it was a dark and stormy night… when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein . 1816 is the most legendary year of the Romantic poetry era. Mary and Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron, were holidaying that summer by Lake Geneva. Terrific storms and rain kept them indoors, so they entertained each other with ghost stories. The rest is history, as they say. But I realized that no-one had properly explored why the weather was so bad that incredible year. So I set out to write a book about it. It turns out that Tambora’s eruption in the tropics affected the climate worldwide—that the experience of our young Romantic poets was part of a great global extreme weather event lasting three years. So Tambora tells the global story behind the Year Without a Summer, when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein , and Percy Shelley and Byron wrote some of their greatest Romantic poetry. What lessons can we draw from the quintessential Romantic year of 1816? First, that climate change is very nasty; and second, wet weather can be inspiring."