Eighteenth-century poetry

Sentimentalist poets of the 18th century. J. Thomson and Th. Gray

Introduction.....................................................................................................1-8

Chapter I Let us now consider the work of the most important of the transitional poets of the eighteenth century......................................................................8-18
1.1 Eighteenth-century poetry ....................................................................8-11
1.2 Thomas Gray transitioned these phases nicely........................................11-16
1.3Poets and poetry after Pope......................................................................16-18
Chapter II It may have been over political matters that Keats quarreled with Dr. Hammond......................................................................................................18-35
2.1 J. Thomson.............................................................................................18-22
2.2Th.Gray...................................................................................................22-30
2.3 Live of Thomson and Gray...................................................................30-35
Conslusion....................................................................................................35-37
References....................................................................................................37-41

Introduction

The eighteenth century is commonly regarded as the century of "prose and reason," the age in which neoclassicism reigned supreme and in which all romantic inclinations lay dormant, if no longer extinct. But that is a verdict too sweeping to be true.
In this century-especially the later section of it-we can see numerous cracks in the classical edifice thru which appears to be peeping the multicoloured mild of romanticism. In the later years of this century a giant variety of new influences had been at work on English sensibility and temper. The trade signalized a alternate in the ethos of poetry and, in fact, literature as a whole. The younger poets began breaking away from the "school" of Dryden and Pope, even though some poets, like Churchill and Dr. Johnson, still elected to remain in the ancient groove. There were very few poets, indeed, who set themselves completely free from the historic standard influences. Most of them are, as it were, like Mr. Facing each ways, looking concurrently at the neoclassical past and the romantic future. They seem to be
Plac 'd on this isthmus of a middle state.
In the determination of subjects for poetic treatment, in the desire of verse patterns, and in the manner of therapy we meet with perceptible adjustments from the conventions of the Popean school. Those eighteenth century poets who show some elements associated with romanticism, whilst no longer altogether ignoring the historic conventions, are known as transitional poets or the precursors of the Romantic Revival.
Let us sum up the romantic qualities of the poetry of these transitional poets.
(i) These poets trust in what Victor Hugo describes as "liberalism in literature". Not tons involved about guidelines and conventions, they agree with in person poetic inspiration.
(ii) Their poetry is not altogether mental in content and treatment. Passion, emotion, and the creativeness are valued with the aid of them above the cold mild of intellectuality. They naturally return to the lyric.
(iii) They have, to quote Hudson, "a love of the wild, fantastic, abnormal, and supernatural."
(iv) They show a new appreciation of the world of Nature which the neoclassical poetry had usually neglected. Their poetry is no longer "drawing-room poetry." They do no longer limit their interest to urban existence and manners only, as Pope almost continually did.
(v) They vicinity greater significance on the person than on society. In them, therefore, is to be viewed at work a stronger democratic spirit, a larger difficulty for the oppressed and the poor, and a increased emphasis on individualism in poetry, in society, everywhere. Their poetry will become plenty more subjective.
(vi) They show a plenty increased pastime in the Middle Ages which Dryden and Pope had not noted on account on their alleged barbarousness. Dryden and Pope admired the Renaissancermuch extra and had many a non secular link with it.
(vii) Lastly, there is a strong response towards the heroic couplet as the solely eligible verse unit. They make experiments with new measures and stanzaic forms. It is stated that each hero ends as a bore. The same was the case with the heroic couplet.
While exhibiting all these above-listed dispositions in their poetic works, the transitional poets are not, however, altogether free from Popean influences. That is exactly why they are no longer full-fledged romantics however solely "transitional" poets. Nevertheless, their work proves: "The eighteenth century was an age of motive however the channels of Romanticism have been by no means dry."
Let us now reflect onconsideration on the work of the most necessary of the transitional poets of the eighteenth century.
James Thomson (1700-48):
He is a usual transitional poet, though he chronologically belongs to the first half of the eighteenth century. Though he was contemporaneous with Pope yet he broke away from the traditions of his college to explore "fresh woods and pastures new." He bade goodbye to the heroic couplet and expressed himself in other verse-Tieasures—blank verse and the Spenserian stanza. He would have mentioned Spenser and Milton as his courses as a substitute than Dryden and Pope. His Seasons (1726-30) is important for correct and sympathetic descriptions of natural scenes. It is entirely unique from such poems as Pope's Windsor Forest on account of the poet's firsthand understanding of what he is describing and his intimate rapport with it. The poem is in blank verse written obviously after the manner of Milton', but now and again it looks to be over-strained, "always labouring uphill," in the words of Hazlitt. Thomson's Liberty is a very long poem. In it Liberty herself is made to narrate her chequered profession thru the a while in Greece, Rome, and England. The theme is stupid and abstract, the narration uninteresting, and the blank verse ponderous. His Castle of Indolence (1748) is in Spenserian stanzas, and it captures much of the luxuriant, imaginitive shade of the Elizabethan poet. As a critic puts it, for languid suggestiveness, in dulcet and harmonious versification, and "for subtly woven vowel track it want not shirk contrast with the best of Spenser himself." Thomson appears forward to the romantics in his hobby in nature, in treating of new subjects, his robust imagination, and his giving up of the heroic couplet. But he is capable of some very egregious examples of poetic diction. Even Dr. Johnson was constrained to observe: "His diction is in the absolute best degree florid and luxuriant. It is too exuberant and once in a while may additionally be charged with filling the ear more than the mind."
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, however tons that was once integral was accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for instance, shows high-quality technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the creativeness and the passions as poetry’s actual realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification as a medium for poetic expression. In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence a ways past his predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray correctly sought shut imitation of the authentic Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English, whilst creating bold ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with the potency of primitive artwork (as evidenced in any other tremendous ode, The Bard, 1757) is section of a larger motion of taste, of which the modern enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a in addition indicator.
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Poets and poetry after Pope
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, however a whole lot that used to be imperative was once accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for instance, displays remarkable technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the creativeness and the passions as poetry’s genuine realm. The odes additionally mine vigorously the potentiality of personification as a medium for poetic expression. In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert Blair’s The Grave (1743) and observed a tensely humane eloquence far past his predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray effectively sought shut imitation of the authentic Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English, while creating formidable thoughts about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with the efficiency of primitive artwork (as evidenced in some other first-rate ode, The Bard, 1757) is phase of a larger motion of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically realized and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart, whose renown rests mostly on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written in the course of confinement in more than a few asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 however now not published till 1939) is composed in free verse and experiments with making use of the antiphonal standards of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending great linguistic vitality with tricky structural patterning. Both include encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore, severa passages of which modern scholarship has but to explicate satisfactorily, however the poetry is consistently energized by way of minute changes of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a unique alertness to the thriller of the commonplace. Smart was also a exceptional creator of hymns, a intelligence in which his fundamental cutting-edge rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779). Both are invaluable successors to the richly innovative work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humour and satiric relaxation, as when, for instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully extreme trip of withdrawal and isolation. His rooted Calvinism brought on him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly brief poem “The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended fulfillment is The Task (1785), an splendid fusion of disparate interests, working flippantly toward religious reward and pious acceptance.
There used to be also a good sized quantity of imaginitive and sometimes popular ladies poets in the period. “Literary ladies” were frequently celebrated and from time to time became revered public figures. Their poetic ventures have been inspired with the aid of the boom in publishing generally and, in particular, by means of the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the main female poets of the length first posted in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most magnificent lady poet of the early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who nevertheless composed for manuscript circulation instead than publication. She additionally wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), posted posthumously in 1763. Notable girl poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries solely after her early death. Much admired in their personal lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote tons miscellaneous prose as nicely as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets had been hugely famous in the 1780s.
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson, Burns verified how Scottish idioms and ballad modes ought to lend a new vitality to the language of poetry. Although born a bad tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were entirely premeditated. His vary is wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an splendid example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary many years in which he wrote, and recurrent in lots of it are a comfortable hymning of freedom, each man or woman and national, and an instinctive belief in the opportunity of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other principal poets, each of whom additionally executed difference in an dazzling array of nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s modern-day repute as a poet rested especially on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village (1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is a spectacular series of character photos in the form of mock epitaphs on a crew of his closest acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of western Europe and the tiers of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by means of a restless wanderer whose heart but yearns after his personal native land, the place his brother still dwells. In The Deserted Village the journey is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the centre of his appreciably popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was once also a deft and full of life practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and 1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays in the beginning published in The Public Ledger in 1760–61, uses the gadget of a Chinese traveller whose letters domestic comment tolerantly however shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theatre after the death of Farquhar in 1707.
But, great poet although he was, the lion’s share of Johnson’s formidable energies used to be expended on prose and on editorial work. From his early years in London, he lived with the aid of his pen and gave himself unstintingly to fulfill the booksellers’ demands. Yet he managed to sustain a remarkable coherence of ethical ambition and personal presence at some point of his voluminous labours. His twice-weekly essays for The Rambler (1750–52), for instance, constantly show his powers at their fullest stretch, managing an surprising array of literary and moral topics with a scrupulous intellectual gravity and attentiveness. Many of the preoccupations of The Vanity of Human Wishes and the Rambler essays reappear in Rasselas (1759), which catalogues with profound resource the vulnerability of human philosophies of life to humiliation at the arms of existence itself. Johnson’s forensic brilliance can be considered in his relentless overview of Soame Jenyns’s Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil (1757), which caustically dissects the latter’s complacent attitude to human suffering, and his analytic capacities are evidenced at their peak in the profitable completion of two major projects, his innovative Dictionary of the English Language (1755) and the tremendous edition of Shakespeare’s performs (1765). The former of these is in some ways his best work of literary criticism, for it shows the uses of words by way of skill of illustrations culled from the exceptional writing in English. The latter performed a main section in the establishment of Shakespeare as the linchpin of a country wide literary canon. It be noted, however, that Johnson’s used to be but the most significantly inspired of a collection of primary Shakespeare variants in the 18th century. These consist of editions by Nicholas Rowe (1709), Pope (1725), Lewis Theobald (1734), Sir Thomas Hanmer (1744), and William Warburton (1747). Others, with the aid of Edward Capell (1768), George Steevens (1773), and Edmund Malone (1790), would follow. Johnson was once but one of those helping to shape a national literature.

Samuel Johnson's definition of “Oats”
A detail of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755). The definition of “Oats” is often cited as evidence of Johnson's prejudice against Scots.
Johnson’s last years produced much political writing (including the humanely resonant Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland’s Islands, 1771); the socially and historically alert Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, 1775; and the consummate Lives of the Poets, 1779–81. The latter was the climax of 40 years’ writing of poetic biographies, including the multifaceted An Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage (1744). These last lives, covering the period from Cowley to the generation of Gray, show Johnson’s mastery of the biographer’s art of selection and emphasis and (together with the preface and notes to his Shakespeare edition) contain the most provocative critical writing of the century. Although his allegiances lay with Neoclassical assumptions about poetic form and language, his capacity for improvisatory responsiveness to practice that lay outside the prevailing decorums should not be underrated. His final faith, however, in his own creative practice as in his criticism, was that the greatest art eschews unnecessary particulars and aims toward carefully pondered and ambitious generalization. The same creed was eloquently expounded by another member of the Johnson circle, Sir Joshua Reynolds, in his 15 Discourses (delivered to the Royal Academy between 1769 and 1790, but first published collectively in 1797).
It was the mid-eighteenth century and poets were tiring of the neoclassical ideals of reason and wit. The Neoclassic poets, such as Alexander Pope, "prized order, clarity, economic wording, logic, refinement, and decorum. Theirs was an age of rationalism, wit, and satire." (Guth 1836) This contrasts greatly with the ideal of Romanticism, which was "an artistic revolt against the conventions of the fashionable formal, civilised, and refined Neoclassicism of the eighteenth century." (Guth 1840) Poets like William, "dropped conventional poetic diction and forms in favour of freer forms and bolder language. They preached a return to nature, elevated sincere feeling over dry intellect, and often shared in the revolutionary fervour of the late eighteenth century." (Guth 589) Poets wanted to express emotion again. They wanted to leave the city far behind and travel back to the simple countryside where rustic, humble men and women resided and became their subjects. These poets, William Blake, Thomas Gray, and Robert Burns, caught in the middle of neoclassic writing and the Romantic Age, are fittingly known as the Transitional poets.
Thomas Gray transitioned these phases nicely; he kept "what he believed was good in the old, neoclassic tradition" ("Adventures" 442) but adventured forth into "unfamiliar areas in poetry." In particular, Gray brought back to life the use of the first-person singular, for example "One morn I missed him on the customed hill…" ("Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", p. 433, line 109) which had been "considered a barbarism by eighteenth century norm." (431) Thomas Gray’s poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is a wonderful example of natural settings in transitional poetry. It "reflects on the lives of common, unknown, rustic men and women, in terms of both what their lives were and what they might have been". ("English" 268) Gray is unafraid to see the poor, and emotionally illustrates how death affects their life: "For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, / Or busy housewife ply her evening care: / No children run to lisp their sire’s return…."
However, humble settings were also readily used by Robert Burns, a Scottish poet "frequently counted wholly as a romantic poet" ("English" 281), but who’s work often makes him a more transitional as it incorporates both neoclassical and romantic verse ideals. To a Mouse, also takes place in the country, and this time the humble subject is not a man, but a lowly mouse. Using such terms as "beastie" and "Mousie" results in an affectionate tone, as the human species is emotionally weighed up against "Mousie’s" life. 
A common ground is found when the poet notes that "the best laid scheme o’ mice an’ men/ Gang aft agley, / An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain". This public display of emotion, such as the affection and concern for the mouse, as well as a depressing revelation that life can go wrong for all, would have been surprising to pre-romanticism readers. One of Burns most significant influences though, was his use of Scottish dialect to write his poems; it was "a great departure from the elegant and artificial diction of eighteenth-century poetry." ("Adventures" 441) His use of dialect gave the reader a sense of connection to the common man and the humble subjects of this poetry. It created a rawer, more real mood that would have been lost in the ornamental heroic couplets used by the Neoclassic writers.
William Blake is, however, arguably the most important transitional poet. As a poet he did away with the common standards of "rationality and restraint" (Guth 589), instead favouring to write using "bold, unusual symbols to elaborate the divine energies at work in the universe" in poems such as The Tyger. This poem makes use of an awe-inspiring mood, coupled with deeply universal concerns and experiences. In this case, the tiger is a symbol of the evil in mankind, and the heavy knowledge of experience that is brought with adulthood. His poems also made great use of repetition and parallelism, sometimes to gain the effect of a nursery rhyme, simple soft and sweet, as read in The Lamb: "Little Lamb God bless thee, / Little Lamb God bless thee." However, the same device also emphasises the rhetorical nature of his famous question "Tyger…what immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" which makes up both the first and last stanza of The Tyger.
The transitional poets were no longer afraid to feel and were brave men who put their hearts on paper for all to see. They expressed a simple affection for uncomplicated country life, and used such settings to make profound comments on mankind in general, death, and religion. These poets idealised the humble man, the country setting, and universal truths. It is fitting to call Gray, Burns and Blake adventurers, whose guides to new lands were their pens. They dared change through the use of unconventional devices, such as dialect, the invocation of emotions, and the egotistic use of the first person singular. These changes in verse, and the subsequent popularity, for Gray and Burns (Blake was not appreciated until the next century) and their transitional poetry marked the beginning of the end of Neoclassicism. Now, these three poets having forged the way, it was time for the Romantics to follow.
Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74):
Goldsmith was as friendly with Dr. Johnson had been with Pope, but that did not curb the individual genius of either. Goldsmith was as essentially a conservative in literary theory as Dr. Johnson of whose "Club" he was an eminent member. Both of his important poems, The Traveller (1764) and The Deserted Village (1770) are in heroic couplets. The first poem is, didactic (after Johnson's visual practice) and is concerned with the description and criticism of the places and people in Europe which Goldsmith had visited as a tramp. The second poem is rich in natural descriptions and is vibrant with a peculiar note of sentiment and melancholy which foreshadows nineteenth-century romantics. As in the first poem, Goldsmith exhibits the tenderness of his feelings for poor villagers.
Thomas Percy (1728-1811):
Percy is known in the history of English literature not for original poetry but for his compilation of ballads, sonnets, historical songs, and metrical romances which he published in 1765 under the title Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. The work .did a lot to revive public interest in that kind of poetry which had gone out of vogue in the age of Dryden and Pope. The book contained poetry from different ages-from the Middle Ages to the reign of Charles. The work had a tremendous and lasting popularity. About its influence on the poets who were to come, we may quote Wordsworth: "I do not think that there is an able writer in verse of the present day who would not be proud to acknowledge his obligation to the Reliques." Even Dr. Johnson favoured Percy's venture and earned his thanks by lending him a hand in the compilation.
Thomas Chatterton (1752-70):
Chatterton is referred to by Wordsworth in his poem Resolution and Independence as
The marvellous boy
The sleepless soul that perished in his pride.
Chatterton, indeed, was a "marvellous boy" who shot into fame, and then, before he was eighteen, poisoned himself with arsenic getting sick of his poverty. Some of his poems are quite Augustan in their matter and from but the most characteristic poems are the ones he published as the work of Thomas Rowley, a fifteenth-century monk who lived in Bristol, Chattertdn's native place. Chatterton gave out that he had discovered them in a box lying in a Bristol church. His hoax was soon seen through, but that does not detract from the merit of the Rowley poems. The poems like Aella and the Ballad of Charity are, according to Hudson, quite remarkable for two reasons-'because they are probably the most wonderful things ever written by a boy of Chatterton's age, and because they are another clear indication of the fast growing curiosity of critics and the public regarding everything belonging to the middle ages." Chatterton's work considerably influenced the romantic poets-who were intensely interested in everything medieval.
James Macpherson (1736-96):
He was another forgerer like Chatterton, though his work was not altogether baseless. He first achieved fame with Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland and translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language which were given out to be "genuine remains of ancient Scottish poetry." Later he produced Fingal, an Epic Poem in six books (1762), and then Temora, an Epic Poem in eight books (1763). Macpherson asserted ttyat these two poems were the genuine work of a Gaelic bard of the third century, names Ossian and that he had given their literal translation in prose. His claims.provoked an acrimonious controversy as to their genuineness. "Fortunately," says Hudson, "we need not enter ihto the discussion in order to appreciate the epoch-making character of Macpherson's work. In the loosely rhythmical prose which he adopted for his so-called translations he carried to an extreme the formal reaction of the time against the classic couplet. In matter and spirit he is wildly romantic." His poems transport the reader to a new world of heroism and super-naturalism tinged with melancholy, a world which is altogether different from the spruce and reasonable world of Pope.
Thomas Gray (1716-71):
Gray was one of the most learned men of the Europe of his day. He was also a genuine poet but his poetic production is lamentably small-just a few odes, some miscellaneous poems, and the Elegy. He started his career as a strait-jacketted classicist and ended as a genuine romantic. His work, according to Hudson, is "a kind of epitome of the changes which were coming over the literature of his time." His first attempts, The Alliance of Education and Government and the ode On a Distant Prospect of Eton College were classical in spirit, and the first mentioned, even in its use of the heroic couplet. ElegyWritten in a Country Churchyard is Gray's finest poem which earned him the praise of even Johnson who condemned most of Gray's poetry. Hudson observes about this poem: "There is, first, the use of nature, which though employed only as a background, is still handled with fidelity and sympathy i There is, next, the churchyard scene, the twilight atmosphere, and the brooding melancholy of the poem, which at once connect it...with one side of the romantic movement-the development of the distinctive romantic mood. The contrast drawn between the country and the town the peasant's simple life and 'the madding crowd's ignoble strife'-is a third particular which will be noted. Finally, in the tender feeling shown for 'the rude forefathers of the hamlet' and the sense of the human value of the little things that are written 'in the short and simple annals of the poor', we see poetry, under the influence of the spreading democratic spirit reaching out to include humble aspects of life hitherto ignored." Gray's next poems, The Progress of Poesy and The Bard, present a new conception of the poet not as a clever versifier but a genuinely inspired and prophetic genius. His last poems like The Fatal Sisters and The Descent of Odin are romantic fragments with which we step out of the eighteenth century and find ourselves in the full stream of romanticism.

William Collins (1721-59):

Collin's work is as thin in bulk as Gray's-it does not extend to much more than 1500 lines. He combines in himself the neoclassic and romantic elements, though he is not without a specific manner which is all his own. On the one hand, he provides numerous examples of poetic diction at its worst, and, on the other, he delights in the highly romantic world of shadows and the supernatural. His Ode on the Popular Superstions of the Highlands foreshadows the world in which Coleridge delighted. He is chiefly known for his odes. To Liberty and the one mentioned above are the lengthiest of Collins' odes, but he is at his best in shorter flights. He is exquisite when he eschews poetic diction without losing his delightful singing quality. Referring to Collins, Swinburne maintains that in "purity of music" and "clarity of style" there is "no parallel in English verse from the death of Marvell to the birth of William Blake." n
William Cowper (1731-1800):
"He", says Compton-Rickett, "is a blend of the old and the new, with much of the form of the old and something of the spirit of the new. In his satires he imitated the manner of Pope, but his greatest poem The Task is all his own. It is written in blank verse and contains the famous line:
God made the country and man made the town
which indicates his love of Nature and simplicity. However, the classical element in him is more predominant than the romantic. Compton-Rickett maintains: "We shall find in his work neither the passion nor the strangeness of the Romantic school. Much in his nature disposed to shape him as a poet of Classicism, and with occasional reserves he is far more of a classical poet than a romantic. Yet throughout Cowper's work we feel from time to time a note of something that is certainly not the note of Pope or Dryden, something deeper in feeling that meets us even in Thomson, Collins, or Gray. There is a tenderness in poems like My Mother's Picture, that not even Goldsmith in his verse can quite equal; while his fresh and intimate nature pictures point to a stage in the development of poetic naturalism, more considerable than we find in Thomson and his immediate succesors."
George Crabbe (1754-1832):
He mostly continued the neoclassic tradition and was derisively dubbed as "a Pope in worsted stockings." In his poetry, which is mostly descriptive of the miseries of poor villagers, he was an uncompromising unromantic realist. He asserted
I paint the Cot
As Truth will paint it, and as Bards will not.
He showed much concern for villagers, but he left for Wordsworth to glorify their simplicity and, even, penury. Crabbe's excessive, boldness as a realist alienates him from the polish.of the neoclassic school. However, he tenaciously adhered to the heroic couplet, even when he was a contemporary of Blake and the romantic poets.
Robert Burns (1759-95):
He was a Scottish peasant who took to poetry and became the truly national poet of Scotland. His work Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) sky-rocketed him to fame. All these poems are imbued with the spirit of romantic lyricism in its untutored spontaneity, humour, pathos and sympathy wjth nature and her lowly creatures including the sons of the soil. Sometimes indeed Bums tries to write in the "correct" manner of the Popean school but then he becomes unimpressive and insipid. A critic observes : "Burns was a real peasant who drove the plough as he hummed his songs, and who knew all the wretchedness and joys and sorrows of the countryman's life. Sincerity and passion are the chief keys of his verse. Burns can utter a piercing lyric cry as in A Fond Kiss and then we Sever, can be gracefully sentimental as in My love is like a Red, Red Rose, can be coarsely witty as in The Jolly Beggars, but he is always sincere and passionate, and that is why his words go straight into the heart." Bums was influenced a great deal by the spirit of the French Revolution. His fellow-feeling extended even to the lower animals whom he studied minutely and treated sympathetically.
William Blake (1757-1827):
Blake was an out and out rebel against all the social, political, and literary conventions of the eighteenth century. It is with considerable inaccuracy that he can be included among the transitional poets or the precursors of the Romantic Revival, as in many ways he is even more romantic than the romantic poets! The most undisciplined and the most lonely of all poets, he lived in his own world peopled by phantoms and spectres whom he treated as more real than the humdrum realities of the physical world. His glorification of childhood and feeling for nature make him akin to the romantic poets. He is best known for his three thin volumes-Poetical Sketches (1783), Songs of Innocence (1789), and Songs of Experience (1794), which contain some of the most orient gems of English lyricism. A critic observes: "His passion for freedom was, also, akin to that which moved Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey in their earlier years, though in its later form, it came nearer to Shelley's revolt against convention. There is, indeed, an unusual degree of fellowship between these two : the imagery and symbolism, as well as the underlying spirit, of The Revolt of Islam, Alastor and Prometheus Unbound find their nearest parallel in Blake's prophetic books. Both had visions of a world regenerated by a gospel of universal brotherhood, transcending law."

Portrait of John Keats by William Hilton.
John Keats was born in London on 31 October 1795, the eldest of Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats’s four children. Although he died at the age of twenty-five, Keats had perhaps the most remarkable career of any English poet. He published only fifty-four poems, in three slim volumes and a few magazines. But over his short development he took on the challenges of a wide range of poetic forms from the sonnet, to the Spenserian romance, to the Miltonic epic, defining anew their possibilities with his own distinctive fusion of earnest energy, control of conflicting perspectives and forces, poetic self-consciousness, and, occasionally, dry ironic wit.
Although he is now seen as part of the British Romantic literary tradition, in his own lifetime Keats would not have been associated with other major Romantic poets, and he himself was often uneasy among them. Outside his friend Leigh Hunt‘s circle of liberal intellectuals, the generally conservative reviewers of the day attacked his work as mawkish and bad-mannered, as the work of an upstart “vulgar Cockney poetaster” (John Gibson Lockhart), and as consisting of “the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language” (John Wilson Croker). Although Keats had a liberal education in the boy’s academy at Enfield and trained at Guy’s Hospital to become a surgeon, he had no formal literary education. Yet Keats today is seen as one of the canniest readers, interpreters, questioners, of the “modern” poetic project-which he saw as beginning with William Wordsworth—to create poetry in a world devoid of mythic grandeur, poetry that sought its wonder in the desires and sufferings of the human heart. Beyond his precise sense of the difficulties presented him in his own literary-historical moment, he developed with unparalleled rapidity, in a relative handful of extraordinary poems, a rich, powerful, and exactly controlled poetic style that ranks Keats, with the William Shakespeare of the sonnets, as one of the greatest lyric poets in English.
Keats was said to have been born in his maternal grandfather’s stable, the Swan and Hoop, near what is now Finsbury Circus, but there is no real evidence for this birthplace, or for the belief that his family was particularly poor. Thomas Keats managed the stable for his father-in-law and later owned it, providing the family an income comfortable enough for them to buy a home and send the older children, John and George (1797-1841), to the small village academy of Enfield, run by the liberal and gifted teacher John Clarke. Young Tom Keats (1799-1818) soon followed them. Although little is known of Keats’s early home life, it appears to have been happy, the family close-knit, the environment full of the exuberance and clamor of a big-city stable and inn yard. Frances Keats was devoted to her children, particularly her favorite, John, who returned that devotion intensely. Under Keats’s father the family business prospered, so that he hoped to send his son, John, to Harrow.
At the age of eight Keats entered Enfield Academy and became friends with young Charles Cowden Clarke, the fifteen-year-old son of the headmaster. He was not a shy, bookish child; Clarke remembered an outgoing youth, who made friends easily and fought passionately in their defense: “He was not merely the ‘favorite of all,’ like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his high-mindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his behalf, that I never heard a word of disapproval from any one, superior or equal, who had known him.” On the night of 15 April 1804, when Keats had been in school less than a year, an accident occurred that would alter his life and proved to be the first in a series of losses and dislocations that would pursue him throughout his brief life. His father was seriously injured when his horse stumbled as he rode home, and he died the next day. The shock to the family was great, emotionally and financially. Within two months of her husband’s death, Frances Keats had moved the children to her mother’s home and remarried; but the marriage soon proved disastrous, and it appears that, after losing the stables and some of her inheritance to her estranged husband, William Rawlings, the poet’s mother left the family, perhaps to live with another man. She had returned by 1808, however, broken and ill; she died of tuberculosis (as had her brother just a few months before) in March 1809. John became the oldest male in his family, and, to the end of his life, felt a fiercely protective loyalty to his brothers and sister, Fanny Keats. His most thoughtful and moving letters on poetry’s relation to individual experience, to human suffering and spiritual development, were written to his brothers.

At school, Keats drew closer to the headmaster, John Clarke, and his son, Cowden. He became, in fact, one of Clarke’s favorite pupils, reading voraciously and taking first prizes in essay contests his last two or three terms. In some part this new academic interest was a response to his loneliness after his mother’s death. But he had by then already won an essay contest and begun translating Latin and French. Keats’s love for literature, and his association of the life of imagination with the politics of a liberal intelligentsia, really began in Clarke’s school. It was modeled on the Dissenting academies that encouraged a broad range of reading in classical and modern languages, as well as history and modern science; discipline was light, and students were encouraged to pursue their own interests by a system of rewards and prizes. Clarke himself was a friend of the radical reformers John Cartwright and Joseph Priestley and subscribed to Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, which Cowden Clarke said, “no doubt laid the foundation of [Keats’s] love of civil and religious liberty.”

Keats’s sense of the power and romance of literature began as the Clarkes encouraged him to turn his energy and curiosity to their library. Cowden Clarke recalled his reading histories, novels, travel stories; but the books “that were his constantly recurrent sources of attraction were Tooke’s ‘Pantheon,’ Lamprière’s ‘Classical Dictionary,’ which he appeared to learn, and Spence’s ‘Polymetis.’ This was the store whence he acquired his intimacy with the Greek mythology.” On his own, Keats translated most of the Aeneid and continued learning French. Literature for him was more than a dreamy refuge for a lonely orphan: it was a domain for energetic exploration, “realms of gold,” as he later wrote, tempting not only as a realm of idealistic romance but also of a beauty that enlarges our imaginative sympathies. All through his life his friends remarked on his industry and his generosity: literature for Keats was a career to be struggled with, fought for, and earned, for the sake of what the poet’s struggle could offer humankind in insight and beauty. This impression recurs often in accounts of Keats, this pugnacity of one who fought his way into literary circles, and this compassion for others that justifies the literary career.

Of course, at this point, when Keats was only fifteen or sixteen, a literary career was not a serious thought. In 1810 Alice Whalley Jennings, Keats’s grandmother, was seventy-five, and in charge of the four orphaned children, John, George (then thirteen), Tom (eleven), and Fanny (seven). She had inherited a considerable sum from her husband, John Jennings (who died in 1805), and in order to ensure the children’s financial future turned to Richard Abbey, a tea merchant who, on the advice of her attorney, she appointed to act as trustee. Most of Keats’s later financial misery can be traced to this decision. If Abbey was no villain, he was nevertheless narrow-minded and conventional, and, where money was concerned, tight-fisted and often deceitful. He dispensed the children’s money grudgingly and often lied or freely interpreted the terms of the bequest: it was not until 1833, years after Fanny Keats came of age, that she finally forced a legal settlement. It has been estimated that by the time of Keats’s death in 1821 either Abbey had withheld from him, or Keats had failed to discover, about £2,000, a considerable inheritance (in those days £50 per year was at least a living wage, and £100-200 would provide a comfortable existence). Keats left Enfield in 1811, and, perhaps at Abbey’s urging—though Clarke remembered it as Keats’s choice—he began to study for a career as a surgeon. He was apprenticed to a respected surgeon, Thomas Hammond, in a small town near Enfield, Edmonton, where his grandmother lived.
We know little of Keats’s life during these years 1811-1814, other than that Keats assisted Hammond and began the study of anatomy and physiology. Surgery would have been a respectable and reasonable profession for one of Keats’s means: unlike the profession of medicine, the job of surgeon in Keats’s day did not require a university degree. A surgeon, licensed by examination, was a general practitioner, setting bones, dressing wounds, giving vaccinations. Keats always maintained he was “ambitious of doing the world some good.” It is likely that he began his career with enthusiasm, but living in the small rooms over the surgery, Keats grew restless and lonely; he began to wander the woods and walk the four miles to Enfield to see the Clarkes. He completed his translation of the Aeneid, and, according to Cowden Clarke, he “devoured rather than read” books he borrowed: Ovid’s Metamorphosis , John Milton‘s Paradise Lost, Virgil’s Eclogues, and dozens of others. But the book that decisively awakened his love of poetry, indeed shocked him suddenly into self-awareness of his own powers of imagination, was Edmund Spenser‘s Faerie Queene.

This was a turning point. Certainly this close teacher-pupil friendship with Cowden Clarke, these evenings at the headmaster’s table, and the long late-night rambles discussing books borrowed from the library, were crucial in making John Keats a poet. His friend Charles Brown believed Keats first read Spenser when he was eighteen, in 1813 or 1814: “From his earliest boyhood he had an acute sense of beauty, whether in a flower, a tree, the sky, or the animal world; how was it that his sense of beauty did not naturally seek in his mind for images by which he could best express his feelings? It was the ‘Fairy Queen’ that awakened his genius. In Spenser’s fairy land he was enchanted, breathed in a new world, and became another being.” Soon, wrote Brown, he “was entirely absorbed in poetry.” (Brown subsequently struck out the word entirely.) Clarke recalled Keats’s exuberant joy, “he ramped through the scenes of that… purely poetical romance, like a young horse into a Spring meadow.” Some time in 1814 Keats wrote his first poem, “In Imitation of Spenser.” What is remarkable about this first poem is its vitality, its appropriation of the Spenserian rhyme scheme and richly compressed imagery to evoke a romantically voluptuous dream world. It is a youthful piece. But the poetic ear is acute, the natural description delights in itself, and the verse dares with naive persistence to draw attention to the power of poetic image to set a dreamy scene (“Ah! could I tell the wonders of an isle / That in that fairest lake had been / I could e’en Dido of her grief beguile.” And of course he does attempt to tell).

But there was more than “pure poetry” involved in Keats’s turn, over the next year or two, to poetry as a vocation. Politics played a role as well—in fact, a decisive one. As early as 1812 Cowden Clarke had met the radical publisher of The Examiner, Leigh Hunt; in 1814 he was a regular visitor to Hunt’s prison cell (he had been imprisoned in 1813 for libeling the Prince Regent), and Keats must have been enthralled by another kind of romance than Spenser’s—the romance of the London circle of artists and intellectuals who supported progressive causes and democratic reform, and opposed the aristocratic counterrevolution then waging war on Napoleon. Indeed, in these liberal circles of the Regency bourgeoisie, Keats might even hope to attract attention, even as an outsider, on the strength of his political enthusiasm and poetic talent. His next poems are political: in April 1814 the kings of Europe had defeated Napoleon, but amid the general optimism in England, liberals, including Keats in “On Peace,” called on the victors to support reform. The sonnet, his first, is clumsy and shrill. But it does show how Keats meant to get attention. In February 1815, Hunt was released, and Keats offered a sonnet, “Written on the Day That Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison,” through Cowden Clarke, whom he stopped on his way to meet Hunt: “when taking leave, he gave me the sonnet,” said Clarke, “... how clearly do I recall the conscious look and hesitation with which he offered it!” The publication of this sonnet in the Poems of 1817 would have been noted by the conservative reviewers who would later attack him as an associate of Hunt’s. To take a political stand so early in his career was a bold act: in those turbulent times political passions ran deep.

It may have been over political matters that Keats quarreled with Dr. Hammond. We know that he did and that for some reason he left his apprenticeship early. On 1 October 1815, Keats moved to London and registered at Guy’s Hospital for a six-month course of study required for him to become a licensed surgeon and apothecary. This move to the dreary neighborhood of the Borough, just south of London Bridge, was exciting for Keats. He could be near his family now: his grandmother had died in December 1814, and George and Tom moved to Abbey’s countinghouse where they were apprenticed (Fanny went to live with the Abbeys at Walthamstow). Before the move, Keats in 1815 seems to have been moody and at times deeply depressed. In the February 1815 poem “To Hope” he speaks of “hateful thoughts [that] enwrap my soul in gloom,” and “sad Despondency.” This was perhaps only a fashionable literary pose—he had recently written a sonnet in praise of Byron’s “sweetly sad” melody—and it takes a political turn, looking to “Hope” as a principle of social liberation. But his brother recalled this time as one of brooding uncertainty, his grandmother’s death no doubt having increased his anxiety to bring some stability to what remained of a family so shaken by death and dislocation. More pressing, perhaps, was his growing eagerness, in the exciting political climate of Napoleon’s brief return from March until the Battle of Waterloo in June, to make some contribution as a poet to the liberal cause. He was fully committed to a career as a surgeon but was still determined to find time to write verse.

His brother George, to ease John’s troubled moods, introduced him to his friends Caroline and Anne Mathew and their cousin, would-be poet, George Felton Mathew. Keats’s friendship with Mathew was brief but stimulating. With the two sisters Keats maintained a conventional literary friendship, addressing to them some stilted anapests (“To Some Ladies,” “On Receiving a Curious Shell ...,” “O Come, dearest Emma!”) in the style of the popular Regency poet Thomas Moore. The friendship with George Mathew, though, buoyed his spirits and encouraged him in his poetic purpose. Here at last was a poet, who—initially at least—seemed to share his literary tastes and encouraged his verse writing. If his brother remembered Keats’s emotional distress, Mathew, writing to Keats’s biographer Richard Monckton Milnes more than thirty years later, remembered that Keats “enjoyed good health—a fine flow of animal spirits—was fond of company—could amuse himself admirably with the frivolities of life—and had great confidence in himself.” Mathew was reserved, rather conservative, and earnestly religious; the friendship soon cooled. But in November 1815 Keats addressed to him his longest poem yet, “To George Felton Mathew,” in heroic couplets modeled on the Elizabethan verse epistle. Despite the stiffness of the verse, the style, colloquial yet descriptively lush, is becoming recognizably Keats’s own though clearly developed from his reading of Hunt and Wordsworth; and, most interestingly, the themes would become characteristic, though here they are only suggested: that poets associate in a “brotherhood” of the “genius—loving heart”; that they represent, as much it does show how Keats meant to get attention. In February 1815, Hunt was released, and Keats offered a sonnet, “Written on the Day That Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison,” through Cowden Clarke, whom he stopped on his way to meet Hunt: “when taking leave, he gave me the sonnet,” said Clarke, “... how clearly do I recall the conscious look and hesitation with which he offered it!” The publication of this sonnet in the Poems of 1817 would have been noted by the conservative reviewers who would later attack him as an associate of Hunt’s. To take a political stand so early in his career was a bold act: in those turbulent times political passions ran deep.

It may have been over political matters that Keats quarreled with Dr. Hammond. We know that he did and that for some reason he left his apprenticeship early. On 1 October 1815, Keats moved to London and registered at Guy’s Hospital for a six-month course of study required for him to become a licensed surgeon and apothecary. This move to the dreary neighborhood of the Borough, just south of London Bridge, was exciting for Keats. He could be near his family now: his grandmother had died in December 1814, and George and Tom moved to Abbey’s countinghouse where they were apprenticed (Fanny went to live with the Abbeys at Walthamstow). Before the move, Keats in 1815 seems to have been moody and at times deeply depressed. In the February 1815 poem “To Hope” he speaks of “hateful thoughts [that] enwrap my soul in gloom,” and “sad Despondency.” This was perhaps only a fashionable literary pose—he had recently written a sonnet in praise of Byron’s “sweetly sad” melody—and it takes a political turn, looking to “Hope” as a principle of social liberation. But his brother recalled this time as one of brooding uncertainty, his grandmother’s death no doubt having increased his anxiety to bring some stability to what remained of a family so shaken by death and dislocation. More pressing, perhaps, was his growing eagerness, in the exciting political climate of Napoleon’s brief return from March until the Battle of Waterloo in June, to make some contribution as a poet to the liberal cause. He was fully committed to a career as a surgeon but was still determined to find time to write verse.

His brother George, to ease John’s troubled moods, introduced him to his friends Caroline and Anne Mathew and their cousin, would-be poet, George Felton Mathew. Keats’s friendship with Mathew was brief but stimulating. With the two sisters Keats maintained a conventional literary friendship, addressing to them some stilted anapests (“To Some Ladies,” “On Receiving a Curious Shell ...,” “O Come, dearest Emma!”) in the style of the popular Regency poet Thomas Moore. The friendship with George Mathew, though, buoyed his spirits and encouraged him in his poetic purpose. Here at last was a poet, who—initially at least—seemed to share his literary tastes and encouraged his verse writing. If his brother remembered Keats’s emotional distress, Mathew, writing to Keats’s biographer Richard Monckton Milnes more than thirty years later, remembered that Keats “enjoyed good health—a fine flow of animal spirits—was fond of company—could amuse himself admirably with the frivolities of life—and had great confidence in himself.” Mathew was reserved, rather conservative, and earnestly religious; the friendship soon cooled. But in November 1815 Keats addressed to him his longest poem yet, “To George Felton Mathew,” in heroic couplets modeled on the Elizabethan verse epistle. Despite the stiffness of the verse, the style, colloquial yet descriptively lush, is becoming recognizably Keats’s own though clearly developed from his reading of Hunt and Wordsworth; and, most interestingly, the themes would become characteristic, though here they are only suggested: that poets associate in a “brotherhood” of the “genius—loving heart”; that they represent, as much direct observation and experience of suffering as John Keats. Until the early summer of 1816 he studied medicine at Guy’s Hospital, and he did so well he was promoted to “dresser” unusually quickly. His duties involved dressing wounds daily to prevent or minimize infection, setting bones, and assisting with surgery. He took to the work well, lodging with two older students at 28 St. Thomas Street, attending lectures by the foremost surgeon of the day, Astley Cooper, as well as courses in anatomy and physiology, botany, chemistry, and medical practice. Yet by the spring of 1816 he was clearly becoming restless, even defensive, about poetry. He was increasingly excited by the new modern poetry of Wordsworth (whose 1815 Poems Keats had obtained just as he entered Guy’s), its naturalism and direct appeal to the secular imagination so different from Spenser’s romance. And, once again, there was the influence of Hunt, whose homey poetic diction with its colloquial informality, seemed daring to the twenty-year-old Keats, who would have associated Hunt’s 1816 poems in The Examiner with a politically antiauthoritarian movement of which modern poetry was a part. He began to speak about poetry, and little else, to his fellow students, with a kind of insecure arrogance. “Medical knowledge was beneath his attention,” said his fellow student and roommate, Henry Stephens, “no—Poetry was to his mind the zenith of all his Aspirations—The only thing worthy the attention of superior minds.... The greatest men in the world were the Poets, and to rank among them was the chief object of his ambition.... This feeling was accompanied with a good deal of Pride and some conceit; and that amongst mere Medical students, he would walk & talk as one of the Gods might be supposed to do, when mingling with mortals.” We need not, perhaps, take this memory too seriously, but clearly Keats wanted to think of himself as a man of literature. Flushed with enthusiasm for Hunt’s poetry, he sent to The Examiner in March a sonnet that he had written the previous autumn, “Solitude.” It was published 5 May 1816. Stephens recalled, “he was exceedingly gratified.”

However lofty his conception of the poet in 1816, Keats chose an unfortunate model in Leigh Hunt. The typical Hunt idiom was a highly mannered luxuriance, characterized by an abundance of -y and -ly modifiers, adjectives made from nouns and verbs (“bosomy,” “scattery,” “tremblingly”), as well as a jaunty colloquialism. Surely we can hear this Huntian influence in the little verses Keats scribbled on the cover of Stephens’s lecture notebook: “Give me women, wine and snuff, / Until I cry out ‘hold, enough!’”; or in some verses he began in the style of Hunt’s Story of Rimini (1815), “Specimen of an Induction to a Poem”: “Lo! I must tell a tale of chivalry; / For while I muse, the lance points slantingly / Athwart the morning air: some lady sweet ... Hails it with tears.” The reader notes in this poem the frequent enjambment for which Hunt himself had argued, against the masculine (strong-syllable) rhymed, end-stopped couplets of Alexander Pope; Hunt also disliked median caesurae, arguing for the fluidity of lines that paused later, after “weak” syllables. This argument (however arcane it may appear now) had political resonance for Hunt, since it promised to break the “aristocratic” sound of the heroic couplet so pleasing to conservative tastemakers. (Lord Byron, who objected to Hunt’s theories, never completely forgave Keats for his attack on Pope in “Sleep and Poetry.”)
But if these elements in Hunt’s poetry seemed declassé to his and Keats’s critics, today one cannot say that Hunt’s influence on Keats was in any simple sense bad. For one thing Hunt was not Keats’s only model. Spenser was a more serious and enduring influence, as were Browne, Drayton, Milton, Wordsworth, and later, Shakespeare. Most twenty-year-old poets need a model of some sort, and there were certainly more banal models in his day from which to choose. On the other hand (as Walter Jackson Bate suggests), to attempt to have written like a greater and more popular poet, like Byron, would not have had the energizing effect on Keats’s verse that Hunt had. Hunt enabled Keats to write and, eventually, to surpass him. For a young middle-class liberal with no university training, a healthy dislike of Pope and an enthusiasm for Hunt and Wordsworth provided an enabling sense of identity. Finally, Keats was by no means, even in 1815-1816, a slavish imitator. His works have a troubled sense of self-consciousness completely absent from Hunt’s. Keats’s are also poems of escape to nature, and in these tropes we can sense as much Keats’s very shrewd (and early) understanding of Wordsworth’s poetic project as of Hunt’s. In poems such as the fine sonnet “How many bards gild the lapses of time!” or the “Ode to Apollo,” or the lovely (summer 1816) sonnet “Oh! how I love, on a fair summer’s eve,” one finds an important Keatsian trope: the poem about the poet’s own sense of himself as a modern, preparing to write from his experience a new poetry to match that of England’s great writers.

On 25 July 1816 Keats took, and passed, the examinations that allowed him to practice surgery, and left London for the fashionable seaside resort of Margate. It had been a trying year (and a difficult exam: Stephens flunked), and Keats needed to escape the hot, dirty streets of the Borough to collect his thoughts. Here, for the first time really, he confronted, in a long poem of generally self-assured verse, his own struggle to become a poet, in the Epistle to My Brother George, inspired by verse epistles Hunt published in The Examiner but interesting in its own right. For here Keats explored what it would mean to him “to strive to think divinely,” to have a poet’s imaginative vision while absorbing the sights and sounds of nature in a kind of Wordsworthian “wise passiveness.” As so often in Romantic poetry, a poet’s complaint at being unable to have a vision itself becomes a vision of what he might see if he were a true poet. After fifty lines or so of such inspiration, though, Keats breaks off—”And should I ever see [visions], I will tell you / Such tales as must with amazement spell you”—in favor of a long, discursive speech by a dying poet who celebrates the joy he has brought the world. Despite the sketchiness of the effort, and Keats’s obvious frustration with himself, this poem and the other Margate epistle, “To Charles Cowden Clarke,” are remarkable for their brave and serious tone of self-exploration. Keats, confronting his indebtedness to other poets and his hopes for himself, had found a theme that would launch his career.

He returned to London in late September and took rooms near Guy’s Hospital, 9 Dean Street, and amid the gloomy little alleys began again his work as a dresser until he could formally assume the duties of a surgeon on his twenty-first birthday in October. Dreary as this beginning must have seemed, the month would be fateful for the young poet.
Cowden Clarke had been living in London, and this warmhearted schoolmaster was excited to receive the long epistle from Keats. One night in early October, Clarke invited Keats to his rooms in Clerkenwell. He especially wanted to show Keats a volume that was being shown around Hunt’s circle, a 1616 folio edition of George Chapman‘s translation of Homer. The two friends pored over the volume until six in the morning, and when Keats reached home he sat down immediately to compose a sonnet, titled in manuscript “On the first looking into Chapman’s Homer.” With obvious pride and excitement he sent it to Clarke by a post that reached him at ten that morning. Surely Keats felt, as critics today would agree, that this was the most perfect poem, the most beautifully written and sustained verse, he had yet written.

As he would so often, Keats wrote the “Homer” sonnet in response to the power and imaginative vision of another poet. And again, that power is perceived as an absence, a gap between Keats’s small voice—or the concrete experience of any individual—and the sublime limitlessness of a great and distant imagination (this tension reappears in the more complex relation of the poet to the Grecian urn and the nightingale). Unlike his first sonnets, inspired by the natural charm of Hunt’s sonnets, this sonnet is based on a structural principle that he would later bring to perhaps its greatest fulfillment in English poetry in his odes, the expression of the irresolvable contrarieties of experience in the interplay of verse elements—quatrain, octave and sestet, rhymes, words, and even sounds. In this sonnet, the energy and excitement of literary discovery—Keats, in reading Homer, feels not bookish pleasure but the awe of a conquistador reaching the edge of an uncharted sea—is presented as direct emotion, not, as it had been in the epistles, a disabling and self-conscious pose. The emotion is, for the first time, sustained and controlled throughout the verse, with a sureness of diction, and even sound, that never falters: for example, the sense of openness to a vast sea of wonder is suggested by long vowels (“wild,” “surmise,” “silent”), tapering off to hushed awe in the weak syllables of the final word, “Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” As published (with line 7 altered, in The Examiner , 1 December 1816), the sonnet takes its place with Wordsworth’s and some of Keats’s own, as among the finest of the nineteenth century.

Keats carefully copied out this sonnet, along with some other poems including the sonnet “How many bards,” and gave them to Clarke to take to Hunt at his Hampstead cottage. Hunt, of course, had published a Keats sonnet, but now was anxious to meet the man himself. Keats responded to Clarke, in a letter of 9 October, “‘t will be an Era in my existence.” It proved to be.

Some time that month he met not only Hunt, but also men who were to be close friends and supporters all his life: John Hamilton Reynolds and Benjamin Haydon. Within a few weeks he would meet Shelley‘s publisher Charles Ollier, who would bring out Keats’s first volume. Hunt recalled of this first meeting “the impression made upon me by the exuberant specimens of genuine though young poetry that were laid before me, and the promise of which was seconded by the fine fervid countenance of the writer. We became intimate on the spot, and I found the young poet’s heart as warm as his imagination.” It was, said Clarke, “`a red-letter day’ in the young poet’s life, and one which will never fade with me while memory lasts… Keats was suddenly made a familiar of the household, and was always welcomed.” This was so to the last months of his life, when the ill poet made his way back to the Hunts’ even though by then Keats had come to judge him egotistical and manipulative and had long since rejected his poetical influence on his career.
However trying Keats may have found Hunt, throughout his life he could think of Hampstead as a refuge, Hunt’s pleasant domesticity in his beautiful surroundings harmonizing with the easy urbanity of high Regency culture, of books, paintings, music, liberal politics, and literary conversation with the great talents of the age. Keats himself had moved, in November, to lodgings at 76 Cheapside, with his brothers, George and Tom. Until Tom’s death two years later broke it up, this would be the happiest household Keats would know. He traveled often to Hunt’s in these months, his friendship growing with the witty young Reynolds and the crotchety, energetic egomaniac Haydon. Reynolds, about Keats’s age, was a not too successful poet and essayist, but had a quick mind and literary polish; in the next few weeks he would introduce Keats to John Taylor and James Hessey, who became his publishers after Ollier dropped him; to Charles (Armitage) Brown, the rugged, worldly businessman who was one of Keats’s most loyal friends, traveling with him through Scotland in the summer of 1818, and sharing rooms with him at his home at Wentworth Place, Hampstead (now the Keats House and Museum), from December 1818 until May 1820; Charles and Maria Dilke, who built the double house in Hampstead with Brown; and Benjamin Bailey, an Oxford student with whom Keats stayed the following fall. Haydon’s vast canvases and blustering (later in life, sadly manic), often pugnacious self-assurance impressed Keats with his notion that modern artists could produce great works of epic dimensions; he introduced Keats to William Hazlitt, whose notions of poetic energy, “gusto,” and of imagination as an intensification of sensory experience enabling us to transcend self, were to begin Keats’s own meditations on aesthetics.

When Keats stayed at the Hunts’, a cot was set up in the library for him, and it was here, in November and December 1816, he planned his two long poems “I stood tip-toe” and “Sleep and Poetry.” Though the diction of these rhymed couplets is often adolescent, and the syntax turgid, these were the first serious long poems Keats intended for publication, and their themes introduce enduring concerns. Clearly, by November, Hunt had begun to plan a volume of his new protégés verse, with the Olliers as publishers. “I stood tip-toe” was filled out for this purpose, Keats having begun it sometime in the summer as a treatment of the myth of Endymion. In this poem, Keats begins with lush natural description, although his purpose is Wordsworthian, to write poetry inspired by nature that will rise to myth: “For what has made the sage or poet write / But the fair paradise of Nature’s light?” Nature inspires poets to sing sweet songs of mythic figures; but the poet is called by “unearthly singing” from a resting place of the divine, “Full in the speculation of the stars.” This meeting of the divine with the human is symbolized by the marriage of the mortal Endymion with the moon, Cynthia, and initiates a regenerated world of art and poetry: “Was there a Poet born?” in this marriage, the poem asks. Keats finished this poem in December, and tentatively called it “Endymion,” his first poetic use of the myth.

“Sleep and Poetry,” written in December, is the more serious poem of the two. It lays out a poetic project and manifesto for the young poet. Poetry here is distinguished from mere sleep, or dream, in engaging “the strife of human hearts,” the sorrow of life, as well as proceeding from an immersion in the joys of sensation. Keats boldly aligns himself with Wordsworth’s naturalism, attacking the “foppery” of neoclassicism: he will begin his poetic education in nature in order to comprehend the human heart. The “great end” of poetry is “that it should be a friend / To sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man.” The poem ends with the notion of a “brotherhood” of literary cultivation as the poet returns to his evening in Hunt’s library, an ideal union of natural grace, liberality, and poetic tradition. Although these thoughts began with the verse epistles, this poem is his most earnest attempt yet to find a purpose for literature within modern life, and he baoldly asserts that a new poetry has begun, a modern humanism with roots in nature and myth. Contemporary critics immediately understood, and condemned, this young poet’s radical associations—more offensive to them than the poem’s occasional Huntian lapses and adolescent posturing.