This section seeks to display Keats’s generic variety in the first half of his brief career. In an 1818 review originally signed ‘Z’, John Gibson Lockhart dismisses Keats’s literary aspirations in the same vein that John Wilson Croker would in his essay in the Quarterly Review: ‘so back to the shop Mr John, back to “plasters, pills, and ointment boxes”, &c. But, for Heaven’s sake, young Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry.’1 With his reviewers linking politics and poetry, class and rhyme,2 Keats suffered for his ‘Cockney’ rhymes in ‘Sleep and Poetry’. Endymion: A Poetic Romance received mixed reviews, but the power of Keats’s early ‘poetic romance’ is increasingly recognized by critics. Experimenting with the possibilities of poetry in lush couplets, Endymion blends genres, myths, and ideas in an ‘indistinct profusion’ that highlights the beauty of the poetry and the power of the poet.3 The sonnets extend this experimentation as Keats, like his fellow romantics, adapted the sonnet form, which, like other genres, became ‘[a] time‐bound entit[y], not transcendent form[s]’.4 Keats adopted and then adapted the sonnet, revivifying it to bear witness to the range and depth of his poetic voice.
‘Sleep and Poetry’, written while residing at Leigh Hunt’s Hampstead cottage, was started in the autumn of 1816 and completed in December of the same year. A manifesto for Keats’s poetic preoccupations, ‘Sleep and Poetry’ seemed, to many of its readers, to embody Hunt’s reformist political beliefs. Keats was denigrated as one of Hunt’s coterie rather than as a poet in his own right; for John Wilson Croker, Keats was ‘unhappily a disciple of the new school of what has been somewhere called Cockney poetry; which may be defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language’.5 Though Keats did, following Hunt, adopt ‘a freer spirit of versification’,6 ‘Sleep and Poetry’ moves between doubt and assertion of his poetic beliefs: Susan J. Wolfson notes that ‘what makes “Sleep and Poetry” a drama of rather than a dramatization of aspiration is its rhythm of hesitation: this poet keeps retracing the plan, the tracing becoming the tale’.7 The drama that she suggests forms the greater part of the poem’s importance, with Keats’s recurring questions in the poem opening up challenges to his assertions rather than implying faith via rhetorical questions. Teetering on the brink of admitting his fear that he may be unsuccessful, Keats’s pleas gain poignancy from their longing:
O Poesy! for thee I hold my pen
That am not yet a glorious denizen
Of thy wide heaven—Should I rather kneel
Upon some mountain‐top until I feel
A glowing splendour round about me hung,
And echo back the voice of thine own tongue?
O Poesy! for thee I grasp my pen
That am not yet a glorious denizen
Of thy wide heaven; yet, to my ardent prayer,
Yield from thy sanctuary some clear air,
Smoothed for intoxication by the breath
Of flowering bays, that I may die a death
Of luxury, and my young spirit follow
The morning sunbeams to the great Apollo
Like a fresh sacrifice; (‘Sleep and Poetry’, 47–61)8
Repeating the rhyme of ‘pen’ and ‘denizen’, Keats does not labour under the assumption that ‘it might work better on a second attempt than the first’.9 Rather, Keats theatrically restages the scene, moving from the image of kneeling on the mountain‐top, to praying, to yearning to ‘die a death / Of luxury’. Asking direction from Poesy, the questions seem both anxious and amused as Keats suggests a wry irony in his stagey apprenticeship.10 The echo intimates self‐consciousness as the line repeats to allow the rhymes to fall into place with ease, but it also underscores a potential immaturity as the rhyme embodies the poem’s fears with an ironic edge. Rather than being Apollo’s inheritor or double, Keats characterizes himself as ‘[l]ike a fresh sacrifice’, feminizing himself into an Andromeda‐like pose in an almost eroticized passage focused on luxury and intoxication. But Keats is not content to remain intoxicated. Conflict enters the poem as he joins the attack on neoclassical poetry.
After delighting in the realms of ‘Flora, and old Pan’ (‘Sleep and Poetry’, 102), Keats feels pressure to return to ‘the agonies, the strife / Of human hearts’ (124–5) but remains preoccupied with his vision of a charioteer and its passage through the enchanted landscape. When the vision breaks down, Keats bleakly records:
The visions all are fled—the car is fled
Into the light of heaven, and in their stead
A sense of real things comes doubly strong,
And, like a muddy stream, would bear along
My soul to nothingness: but I will strive
Against all doubtings, and will keep alive
The thought of that same chariot, and the strange
Journey it went. (‘Sleep and Poetry’, 155–62)
Despite vision slipping away, Keats fights against the almost overpowering nature of ‘real things’ which would destroy poetry. Forced to ‘strive’ to ‘keep alive’, Keats struggles to prolong his imaginative vision in explicit opposition to the forces of mundane life even as the poem does not ignore the age itself.11 Such immersion in the world could only extinguish the vital self, numbing ‘My soul to nothingness’, but determination to refuse such a fate adds spice to Keats’s fear. The dulled repetition of ‘fled’ in the first line suggests that which Keats must struggle against. Poetry cannot descend into a repeated elegy for what has been lost, and this sparks Keats’s outburst against the neoclassical ‘foppery and barbarism’ (182) which had its subjects deluded by its ‘musty laws’ (195) as ‘with a puling infant’s force / They swayed about a rocking horse, / And thought it Pegasus’ (185–7). Far more than a simple rebuke to the eighteenth century’s Pope, Dryden, and so on, Keats explicitly aligns himself with Leigh Hunt and his radical peers in what was the ‘canonical canon controversy’ of the century.12 Provoking the ire of fellow poets, such as Byron, and that of Tory critics, Keats seemed to set out his stall against the past. Yet the energy with which Keats defends his poetic beliefs rivals Byron’s only half‐mocking parody of the Ten Commandments in Don Juan, ‘Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope; / Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey’,13 suggesting that both poets had gained from Pope’s example. Pope’s Essay on Criticism, curiously enough, informs Keats’s ‘Sleep and Poetry’. Though Keats loosens his rhyme, mostly enjambing rather than endstopping his couplets, couplets are still those he chooses in which to announce his poetic beliefs rather than Wordsworth’s blank verse.14 ‘Sleep and Poetry’ seems an exercise in testing and performing his fitness as a poet: ‘Be sure yourself and your own reach to know, / How far your genius, taste, and learning go’ (Essay on Criticism 1.48–9).15
Endymion: A Poetic Romance, composed in 1817 and published in 1818, shows Keats, like his contemporaries Byron and Shelley, using Edmund Spenser’s example to create his central questing theme.16 Viewing the poem’s composition as ‘a trial of my Powers of Imagination, and chiefly of my invention’,17 Endymion is the testing ground for Keats to explore and experiment with poetry. John Bayley and Christopher Ricks have rejected Keats’s own and some of his contemporaries’ judgement that the poem reflects his immaturity, with Bayley claiming that ‘this vulnerable and virginal self’ is the defining strength of his poetry.18 Although Keats avowed the weaknesses of Endymion in his Preface, there remains an underlying sense of the poem’s worth in his preface to the poem: ‘It is just that this youngster should die away; a sad thought for me, if I had not some hope that while it is dwindling I may be plotting, and fitting myself for verses fit to live.’19
Divided into four books, Endymion: A Poetic Romance centres on Endymion and Cynthia’s love affair. Book 1, after the priest’s address to Pan, focuses on the mortal Endymion’s story of his visionary experience of love, a story addressed to his sister Peona after she calms him with a soothing song. By Book 2, Endymion, in his misery, goes wandering and first encounters a naiad who pities his pain before he meets Venus and Adonis, immortal and mortal lovers, and Venus blesses Endymion’s love affair with immortal Cynthia. Then, reunited with Cynthia, his immortal lover relates her passion and love, but warns him that their love must remain secret as she lacks the power to make him immortal nor can she inform her fellow gods: ‘Yet, can I not to starry eminence / Uplift thee; nor for very shame can own / Myself to thee’ (2.777–9). Leaving him after their brief encounter, Endymion’s misery closes Book 2. Book 3 continues with Endymion’s torment. Journeying under water, he pleads with Cynthia to release her hold on him before he encounters Glaucus, Circe’s imprisoned lover. Relating his tale and how he came under Circe’s enchantment, Endymion recognizes Glaucus as his double, crying: ‘We are twin brothers in this destiny!’ (3.713), and Endymion then frees the lovers that Glaucus had arranged in rows under the sea, including Glaucus’ beloved, Scylla. Book 4 shows Endymion encounter an Indian maid, with whom he falls in love despite the torment of his love for Cynthia. He decides to reject Cynthia for his mortal lover, and the Indian maid tells Endymion that she cannot be his lover. Miserably alone, Endymion is reunited with his sister Peona, and they encounter the Indian maiden who then reveals her true identity as Cynthia herself. Endymion ends with Peona’s surprised joy and Endymion’s passionate elation.
Despite Endymion suggesting itself as a narrative poem, the ‘poetic romance’ subtitle is more suggestive of Keats’s design. Seeming almost like a corrective to Alastor, Shelley’s earlier visionary poem, where the Poet falls in love with an unearthly ‘veilèd maid’,20 Endymion reverses the tragic fate of Alastor’s protagonist to offer a more optimistic coupling between a mortal and an immortal. Yet both Keats and Shelley are fascinated by the metapoetic ramifications of visionary poetry. Viewing Endymion as an apprenticeship for Keats, Stuart Curran sees him as writing a failed but ultimately instrumental poem for his future poetic career: ‘Tracing Endymion through convoluted paths and frequently losing him in a luxurious vegetation hastily transplanted from the conservatory, Keats nevertheless taught himself the craft of poetry.’21 This assessment, though rightly emphasizing Keats’s often self‐conscious performance as neophyte, ends up doing an injustice to Endymion. Loaded with lush and luxuriant lines, visionary beauties, and a strong self‐consciousness about the possibilities of myth for the poet, Keats creates a poem that is recognizably in his own style. Keats meditates on poetry as both craft and imaginative overflow. Byron’s crude remark that Endymion engages in ‘mental masturbation’22 is suggestive of the poetry’s self‐delighting artistry, but it misses the mark as to the distinctive beauty of the poetry and Keats’s clear‐eyed awareness of his struggle to write a poem of the scope that he desires.
Book 3, where Endymion encounters Glaucus, is the metapoetic heart of the poem. John Barnard suggests that Book 3 shows Endymion ‘progressively learning to sympathise with the sufferings of others’.23 More than enlarging sympathy, Book 3 blends allegory with narrative, lyric with romance as Keats explores the possibilities of poetry. For Karen Swann, ‘Glaucus is a patently poetic figure: a figure for the poet and the charm of poetry. As literary predecessor to the belated Endymion, his first act is to anoint the youth as his successor, “the man” who has come to complete and redeem his work’.24 Yet Endymion had been anointed successor by Venus, whose well wishes for his immortal love affair had the effect of replacing her and Adonis’ story with Endymion and Cynthia’s newer legend. Rescuing Glaucus from the stultifying order of his own creation, where Glaucus patterned lover with lover in his prison beneath the ocean, Endymion revives the ageing and imprisoning structures in an analogous act to Keats’s own desire to remould poetry in looser imaginative vision after neoclassical stricture. Ambitious yet deliberately vague in the identification between Keats and Endymion, Keats evades rendering the book open only to allegory’s clarifying structure, keeping the poem dream‐like and flowing. If poetry requires revivification by Keats’s aspirant imagination, the young poet would not be didactic enough to insist on such a conclusive reading.
Despite such ambition, Keats does not bask in certainty at the power of his new poetic voice. Keats becomes a kind of Endymion to poetry’s Cynthia as he longs to achieve the visionary heights of the poetry to which he aspires. The shadow of self‐doubt creeps in throughout the poem as ‘[a] sense of real things comes doubly strong’ (‘Sleep and Poetry’, 157) on the apprentice poet, who doubts his fitness as poet. Book 4 opens with an invocation to England’s muse, where Milton’s Paradise Lost shimmers in the background as the great English epic that Keats was reading as he wrote Endymion. Referring to Dante and Virgil, Keats’s aspirations are laid out before the reader, and his swell of patriotism as he hymns the muse’s constancy gives way to the anxious sense that he does not belong to the lineage of the great English poets who have won their muse her ‘full accomplishment’ (Endymion 4.18):
Long have I said, how happy he who shrives
To thee! But then I thought on poets gone,
And could not pray—nor could I now—so on
I move to the end in lowliness of heart. (Endymion 4.26–9)
At the opening of Keats’s final book, the haunting fear that Endymion has failed even as it is being composed comes to the fore. Keats paints himself as longing to give himself to his muse, but the crushing weight of his illustrious predecessors means that he ‘could not pray—nor could I now’ (Endymion 4.28). Despite his despair, Keats will finish his tale. Yet, rather than this moment defining the tone of the rest of the book, Keats draws an implicit parallel between himself and Endymion. At the close of Book 3, Endymion had been transported from under the sea by Neptune to land, as ‘Imagination gave a dizzier pain’ (Endymion 3.1009) to the mortal lover. The imaginative and visionary Book 3 gives way to Book 4, which opens with Endymion marooned far from his lover and far from his native land. Likewise, Keats must descend from his metapoetic exploration of Glaucus and Circe into closing his narrative, drawing the loose threads of his poem together. Once Endymion awakes, his despair is equal to Keats’s, with his first words being to express his anguish, ‘Ah, woe is me!’ (Endymion 4.30). Yet such identification is seamless, subtle, and teasingly incomplete. Keatsian artistry transmutes narrative to luxuriant aesthetic couplets that reveal Endymion as poetic apprenticeship but also expression of his poetic power.
Keats’s sonnets show the young poet entering a crowded arena of sonneteers with a confidence. With the second‐generation Romantic poets arriving late to the sonnet mania that had been ongoing since the 1780s, the sonnet tradition was wide open for reconsideration and exploration.25 Keats was a major figure in such tradition reshaping; poems such as ‘On sitting down to read King Lear once again’ and ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer’ suggest the range and complexity of his ability. ‘On sitting down to read King Lear once again’ opens with a farewell to Romance, the chosen genre of Edmund Spenser’s Fairie Queene which had been deeply influential for Keats in Endymion and elsewhere. Keats instead chooses to venture into the ‘fierce dispute / Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay’ (5–6) embodied in King Lear. Rather than suggesting an absolute rejection of the Romance genre, Keats implies that his embrace of King Lear is predicated on the need for a kind of bracing difficulty. Romance’s seductive escapism is no longer open to the poet. It is Shakespeare’s tragic perfection that Keats requires. Addressing Shakespeare in the sestet, Keats praises the fire of King Lear, savouring ‘The bitter‐sweet of this Shakespearian fruit’ (8), choosing the burning flame of Shakespeare’s passion rather than the ‘barren dream’ (12) of Romance. The poem is loosely composed as a Petrarchan sonnet, and Keats carefully eschews writing in Shakespeare’s anglicized sonnet form, making the most of the volta to turn from the apostrophe to Romance to an apostrophe for Shakespeare. In embracing the Italian form, Keats subtly emphasizes his status as no mere aspirant, despite his claim to ‘humbly assay’ (7) the fruits of King Lear.
‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer’ sees Keats proclaim the power of Homer’s poetry, but he reserves more attention for Chapman, his translator: ‘Yet did I never breathe its pure serene / Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold’ (7–8). If Homer was a superb poet, it required Chapman to translate the blind poet with care and a poet’s ear so as to deliver to Keats such ‘pure serene’ poetry. Where the octave opens with Keats’s mental travels to ‘the realms of gold’ and the second quatrain is dedicated to the combined poetic power of Homer and Chapman, the sestet moves to a compelling reimagining of Keats’s feeling as he entered into the new world of Homer’s imagination recreated in Chapman’s language:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien. (9–14)
The energy of the sestet looks forward to Hyperion when Apollo experiences a similar kind of awakening; here, there is a powerful potential unlocked by Keats’s new‐found land. Though critics and readers have been quick to note that it was, in fact, Vasco Nuñez de Balboa who sighted land, Keats’s mistake when he chose to name ‘stout Cortez’ in place of Balboa offers an insight into the poem. It was Cortez who had led the expedition that ended the Aztec Empire as his warlike approach to colonization brought Mexico under Spanish rule. Cortez’s ‘eagle eyes’ are trained on controlling the land he discovers, bringing it mercilessly under Spanish dominion. The image of Cortez’s powerful gaze and the wonder of his men is suggestive of Keats’s own poetic power. Keats would glory in Homer’s ‘realms of gold’ and then have dominion over that which he surveyed. The sonnet becomes a statement of Keats’s poetic ability; the young poet is not in thrall to Homer’s imagination, but given licence by Homer’s poetry to pursue his own vision.