Historical Context – Keats and Blake
By analyzing literature within its historical and autobiographical contexts, we can often gain new insights into authors’ works. This week, we seek to examine Romantic psychologies, and so I hope to present a brief background of John Keats’s Hyperion and William Blake’s Milton.
In these works, I believe both poets hoped to explore the purpose and function of literature and, more broadly, to study their roles and responsibilities as poets.
General History of Early 1800s
The early 1800s saw population expansions and increased rates of urbanization throughout Europe, partly due to the Industrial Revolution (approximately 1760-1840). The
French Revolution of 1789-1799 had just ended, and ideas of liberty and democracy spread across the continent, though many English feared the rise of French atheism and the “resulting” anarchy. The development of the Cambridge Network, comprised of scientists, historians, scholars, etc. and included amongst its ranks astronomer John Herschel and mathematician
Charles Babbage, spearheaded university reform and founded several of the academic societies of the day. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, famine and high unemployment rates sparked rebellion in the countryside, and the passing of the 1815 Corn Laws, which imposed high tariffs on cereal products, only added to the unrest. Thus, in the 1810s, class struggle emerged as a central problem, most powerfully exemplified by the “Peterloo Massacre” in 1819, when cavalry charged roughly 70,000 demonstrators who had been protesting for parliamentary representation reform. The 1810s are sometimes referred to as the Regency Period, since King
George III was declared too ill to rule and George IV was named Prince Regent.
John Keats and Hyperion
Though John Keats only lived to the age of 25, he is remembered as one of England’s greatest writers, exploring “the desires and sufferings of the human”1 in a variety of poetic forms, including the Miltonic epic and English ode. Born on October 31, 1795 in London, Keats was the oldest of four children. His schoolmates at Enfield Academy described him as outgoing and passionate in the defense of his friends. A fellow student Edward Holmes wrote, “Keats was not in childhood attached to books. His penchant was for fighting. He would fight any one.”2 It is believed the Keats family was close-knit and financially secure, though on the night of April 15,
1804, this all changed. Keats’s father was seriously injured in a horse accident and died the next day. In March 1809, after an ill-fated marriage, the poet’s mother also died, and Keats, the oldest male in his family, was left to protect his family, a duty he took on vigorously. In school,
Keats developed a close friendship with Cowden Clarke, whose father was the headmaster of
Enfield Academy. Under the Clarkes’ encouragement, Keats discovered the power of literature when he was given access to their library. Throughout his life, Keats believed “literature…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.”3 His concept of “soul-making” – the individual character develops from the difficulties a person faces in life – builds off this idea, and many believe Keats’s own tragedies lent itself to, despite his young age, a mature writing voice.
Between the years of 1811 and 1814 Keats began training as a surgeon, though he soon grew restless. Even while studying anatomy and physiology, he would travel four miles to the
Clarkes’ house and their library. He read voraciously and even completed his translation of the
Aeneid, but the book which influenced him most and made him aware of his love of poetry was
Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen. Keats’s medical training progressed quickly and he performed well at Guy’s Hospital, yet his continuing love for poetry soon became clear. His roommate and classmate Henry Stephens recalls, “Poetry was to [Keats’s] 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, an to rank among them was the chief object of his ambition.”4 Though Keats worked as a dresser in London, he continued to pursue poetry and even met Leigh Hunt, John Hamilton
Reynolds, William Wordsworth, Benjamin Haydon and Shelley’s publisher Charles Ollier, who would publish Keats’s first volume of poetry.
In October 1818, Keats began writing his free-verse epic Hyperion, after returning form a walking tour of Northern England and Scotland. However, he never finished the poem because he thought it included “too many Miltonic inversions…Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather, artist’s humour.”5 At this time, his brother Tom was also seriously ill with tuberculosis, and Keats nursed him until his death on December 1, 1818. While some critics have mentioned Keats’s “disinterested” compassion for the fallen Titans, others have noticed the strands of suffering the poet wove into Hyperion. The Poetry Foundation’s biography of John
Keats notes, “As Keats nursed his consumptive brother Tom, he must have felt the difficulties of rising to Negative Capability – even its moral impossibility in the face of Tom’s dying agony.
What good, really, to speak of either inevitable human progress of the birth of a poet in the face of such pain? This indeed would be the subject of Hyperion when Keats attempted to revise it in summer 1819 as The Fall of Hyperion.”6 But that same year, Keats himself contracted tuberculosis, and there was a great sadness which permeated his poetry, especially when he broke off his engagement with Fanny Brawne. Though Hyperion was praised by critics (most of whom dismissed his other works), the epic remained unfinished, as Keats had already reached an advanced stage of the illness. He died on February 23, 1821 in Rome at the age of twenty-five.
As a last note on Hyperion, I believe comparing these Keats’s epic with Anna Barbauld’s
Eighteen Hundred and Eleven would be extremely interesting. In both, one empire gives way to another, and while Keats’s poem is mythological (signified by the rise of Apollo) and Barbauld’s clearly more political (the rise of America), the two poems vividly portray the ruins of a fallen kingdom and what feelings are associated with the loss of power; both seem to the suggest the inevitability of downfall. Of course, the history of the time period also bears heavily on these works, as the War of 1812 and the Napoleonic Wars had, as mentioned above, ended in 1815.
William Blake and Milton
William Blake was born on November 28, 1757 into a middle-class family. He was the third of seven children, though only five survived infancy. Throughout his life, Blake believed that his writings would carry great national significance; indeed, he made his home right in
London, and his works were impacted by the social and political changes of the time. As a child, he would wander the streets of the city and surrounding countryside, and even then, he had a unique sense for the supernatural. According to Alexander Gilchrist in his Life of William Blake, the child was once astonished to “see a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.”7 During his writing career, Blake had a number of sponsors, one of whom was Dr. John Trusler, who attempted to make the writer conform to more conventional tastes. While writing Milton and Jerusalem, Blake was directly influenced by “his erstwhile friend and patron William Hayley…a well-known man of letters who had produced several popular volumes of poetry” (he was also the author of Triumphs of Temper which claimed women should keep their tempers control so that they could become “good wives”).8 In 1800, Hayley convinced
Blake to move roughly fifty-four miles north of London to the village of Felpham. But during their time in Felpham, tensions rose between the two men. Blake believed Hayley to be too hawk-eyed. In January 1803, Blake wrote, “I find on all hands great objections to my doing anything but the meer drudgery of business, & intimations that if I do not confine myself to this, I shall not live.”9 In a separate letter to his brother James, Blake admitted, “The truth is, As a poet
[Hayley] is frighten’d at me & as a Painter his view & mine are opposite; he thinks to turn me into a Portrait Painter as he did Poor Romney, but this he nor all the devils in hell will never do.”10 As David Bindman argues in his introduction to Milton a Poem, Blake wrote the epic to try to grasp his own responses to Hayley and the compliance and repression his patron comes to represent in the poem.11
That same year, 1803, Blake finally returned to London and was thrilled to be back in the familiar hustle and bustle of the city. Nevertheless, he left Felpham with a substantial work, Milton and began engraving plates in 1804. While addressing he readers, Blake made sure to “say little to Mr H., since he is as much averse to my poetry as he is to a Chapter in the Bible.”12 By constantly placing his art and vision above popularity and patronage, “Blake compares himself to the prophet Ezekiel, whom the Lord made strong to warn the Israelites of their wickedness.”13
The text of Milton, which the poet sometimes referred to as “the Grandest poem ever written,”14 often calls attention to what poetry, the poet, and the reader of poetry are. By annihilating the
Selfhood and describing the journeys of Milton, Blake details the process of becoming a poet. In fact, Blake, who “deliberately wrote in the style of the Hebrew prophets and apocalyptic writers…clearly believed himself to be a living embodiment of the spirit of Milton.”15 (There were even rumors that Blake and his wife read passages from Paradise Lost to each other in the nude!16) Indeed, in several of Blake’s works (his dense verse and prose, conflation of visual art with text, etc.), we see a strong for individualism and a sort of deviance from what society expected of a poet.
Endnotes
1 “John Keats.” The Poetry Foundation, 2013, 19 Mar. 2013