A BRITISH CRITIC once said that about John Keats. It is safe to say that his judgment was as accurate as that of the music teacher who informed Ray Charles that he could not sing. But I’ve always been fascinated by the phrase: ‘with no right to aspire to poetry.’

I recently heard of an academic who vehemently expressed the opinion that only the learned have the right to express their views on the poetry of John Keats, a poet whose work received some pretty savage reviews from critics in his time, and who, as I understand it, never used to be considered a ‘difficult poet’, like Gerard Manley Hopkins or John Milton. Difficult poet he may not be, but the Cockney Keats is possibly one of the most beloved of poets, and he is the one to whom many people feel directly connected. Most people who love Keats’s poetry have at least one poem of his that they experience ‘on the pulse’, a poem that they feel speaks to them directly.

My experience with Keats began at the all-girls school I attended in Jamaica where I once had the distinction of collecting seventeen demerits during the course of a single term. Demerits were handed out for various infractions from insubordination to ‘daydreaming’, and I am certain-sure that I must have collected more demerits for ‘daydreaming’ than any other student who ever passed through the gates of that school. Twinned, in pairs. Coupled, in couplets. And whether they were given for ‘inattentiveness’, ‘carelessness’ or if the truth be told ‘just not fitting in’, I was always being punished for the flights of imagination that would often set my mind to wandering away from the classroom, past the netball court, across the playing fields, and up into the top branches of one of the many Lignum vitae trees covered in mauve blossoms that used to grow on the grounds. Once up there I’d sit and stare from a higher vantage point than my viewless seat in the back of the classroom. Almost invariably I would be called down from my daydreamer’s perch in the Lignum vitae tree by a teacher awarding me a demerit or two. It was in my A level English literature paper that I first encountered the image of another daydreamer in ‘To Autumn’ by John Keats.

When I read it through, I just sat there and cried. I didn’t know why, but I now believe that, as Rastafarians say, I ‘sight up’, for there in autumn, personified as a daydreaming voluptuary, I saw myself.

I immediately identified with this poet who reassured me that dreamers are of value too.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too…

Many years later when I found myself teaching an Introduction to Poetry course at the University of Michigan, I had a student whose parents (both academics) were going through a bitter divorce. She came to my office one day to tell me that the only way that she had been able to survive what for her had been a devastating experience was by papering a wall in her bedroom with the John Keats poems we had read and examined in class. My student said she often woke up late at night just to read and be sustained by Keats’s medicinal words. Her favourite poem was ‘Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art’.

Keats must be the poet you get up and read in the middle of the night, because I too have risen at 3 and 4am, struggled up out of deep sleep just to read his great Odes. I did this many times after my cousin’s death and during the twelve years that it took me to write From Harvey River, a memoir of my mother and her people. Something in me wanted to write a praise song to my people, my blood relations as well as the people of Jamaica, but the writing of that book proved to be a long and difficult process. I experienced numerous false starts and setbacks before the very beautiful Ellen Seligman – Peace be upon her – at McClelland and Stewart accepted the manuscript and said, ‘I want to be the one who brings this book home.’ And God Bless her, she did. But during those years of uncertainty as to whether the book would ever become a book, I thought much about potential not being realised, about the frustration of what Keats called, in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, ‘winning near the goal’. But I also just drew great comfort and consolation from reading Keats’s poems mainly because John Keats is all about truth and beauty. He, more than any other writer, has caused me to think long and hard about the love of what is true and beautiful, and how the Creator of all things seen and unseen, who bestows such gifts, is obviously totally impartial, because some of the most unlikely people have been given this gift.

But Keats is the one who wrote that a great poet has no personality. It took just such a writer to be able to rise up and fly with the song of a nightingale for eight exquisite stanzas. A writer whose sympathetic imagination could completely identify with the most beautiful and faithful of exiles, the widow Ruth who refused to abandon her own widowed mother-in-law and followed her instead to Bethlehem where their impoverished circumstances found her gleaning in a foreign field, where she heard the song of the nightingale:

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

She stood in tears amid the alien corn…

I have, on occasion, been reduced to tears while reading those words in a winter classroom in blessed Ann Arbor where for over twenty years I found a home at the University of Michigan, in a supportive community of people like Bob Weisbuch, Lemuel Johnson, Lincoln Faller, Sidonie Smith, Michael Schoenfeldt, George Bornstein, Laurence Goldstein, Tish O’Dowd, Thomas Toon, Nick Delbanco, Linda Gregerson, Keith Taylor, Doug Trevor, Paul Barron, Michael Byers, Marion Johnson, John Whittier-Ferguson, Theresa Tinkle, Eileen Pollack, James Jackson, Lester Monts, Michael Awkward, Evans Young, Derek Collins, Tiya Miles, Frieda Ekotto, Elizabeth James, Arlene Kizer, the two people I think of as my Ann Arbor family – Kate and Ed West – and all the others at the University of Michigan who are true lovers of poetry.

I believe that ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is quite possibly the best poem that has ever been written by anybody. It is a poem with universal appeal, for who has not heard the song of a bird and wanted to rise up and fly away with it, leaving behind life’s weariness, fever and fret? To fly so high that your ordinary eyesight is of no help and you to have to be piloted by your other senses.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,

But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet

Wherewith the seasonable month endows.

I believe that this guessing at the sweet in the state of ‘embalmed darkness,’ is a way of describing faith in a fresh and moving way; and there is no one more qualified to speak on this subject than that fine young man who had to endure so much suffering and loss during his own short lifetime.

In 2013 I was fortunate enough to take part in a poetry reading at Keats House in London that was hosted by Judith Chernaik to celebrate thirty years of Poems on the Underground. I kept hoping all the time I was there that Keats, who was big on the supernatural, would show himself to me in some way, and I guess he did, because it was a truly beautiful evening.

Keats, like Ray Charles and Bob Marley and Mahalia Jackson and John Dunkley, came ‘native with the warmth’, and they were all in their own way vulgar upstarts with no right to aspire to poetry and music and painting. Which is why, whosoever will, without permission from Babylon’s gatekeepers, can profit from the great riches they have brought forth, like the leaves of the tree of life.

‘If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all,’ wrote the sweet boy about the writing of poetry for the benefit of all lovers of truth and beauty – including and especially my dear departed cousin Joan Moran – everywhere.