Essays on Poets

I was fortunate enough to get some essays published in the UK poetry magazine; ‘Poetic Hours’. I have put up my 2 favourite ones on 2 of my favourite poets. Hope you enjoy the first about Percival Bysshe Shelley.

TRUE LOVE OR NOT TO LOVE

“I think one is always in love with something or other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal…”

Percival Bysshe Shelley wrote the above in his journal during the final year of his short, turbulent life. It was regarded by the author as a passing remark but one, I feel, which contains the very essence of what Shelley truly believed about ‘love’.
Throughout his life, from his early idealistic poetry to his later intellectual essays and translations, Shelley was pre-occupied with the confusing concept we call love.

As a teenager, he was fond of quoting St Augustine’s famous line: “Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, querebam quid amarem, amans amare…”; literally translated as “I was not yet in love and I was in love with the idea of loving, so I soiught for something that I might love, since I loved to love”.

Indeed the poet, from a very early age, did love and the list of his partners, although varying from biographer to biographer, certainly included Harriet Grove, Harriet Westbrook, Mary Godwin and Jane “Claire” Clairmont. Reading through Shelley’s letters and poetry one could also add to the list: Emilia Viviani, Jane Williams and other less-well known women. Certain biographers, (aided by psychologists, no doubt) have added Thomas Jefferson Hogg and even his first schoolboy friend, to whom he wrote numerous meaningful letters. Although the list may seem a little extensive for a young ‘gentleman’ living at the start of the nineteenth century, Shelley did not engage in frequent loveless sexual unions like many of his peers and at this time a tide of new, radical ideas about women, philosophy and morality appeared. However, a list of his lovers, physical or platonic, does not answer any questions on Shelley’s feelings about the powerful emotion with which he was so infatuated.

Many of his writings, both in prose and verse, tell us about his personal attitude towards his understanding of one of the most difficult emotions to comprehend. It has been said by Richard Holmes (who, in my view is the best biographer of the poet), that Shelley did not become at peace with his understanding of love until 1821, whilst he was writing one of his greatest works Epipsychidion. Ironically, he was to die the following year. Holmes is probably correct in this calculated observation but I would state that Shelley, like the vast majority of intellectual free-thinkers, believed implicitly in the many wide variations which can be described as ‘love’ and like many romantic poets, he had an idealized view of love, a view which is then prone to be undermined during the harsh realities of everyday life. If one studies his relationships with Harriet Westbrook, Mary Godwin and Claire Clairmont, for example. The variations in his emotions and the lost idealism can be seen time and again.

In the poem Epipsychidion, which in essence is a simplified chronological account of Shelley’s love-life, it is interesting to see the cosmological symbols he uses to identify the major women in his life. Mary is the Moon, Harriet (Westbrook) is the Planet of the Hour, Emilia Viviani is the Sun and Claire is the Comet. Many other identities are deliberately hidden behind images throughout the poem and have been argued over by historians with varying degrees of success. However, to regard Mary as the “…cold chaste Moon” in 1821 tells us some of what Shelley was feeling about his wife, towards the end of his life. Many poems add weight to the theory of “idealistic love lost”; for example, When the Lamp is Shattered written in 1822 opens with the lines:

When the lamp is shattered
The light in the dust lies dead;
When the cloud is scattered
The rainbow’s glory is shed.
When the lute is broken
Sweet tones are remembered not;
When the lips have spoken
Loved accents are soon forgot.

During the last few months of his life, Shelley was embroiled in a platonic affair with Jane Williams and many of his final poems are dedicated to her and are romantic poems about her. This ‘affair’ brought about by his failing relationship with Mary, also forcefully points out that Shelley was by not involving himself sexually with Jane, thus creating a perfect idealistic relationship, somehow spiritual and eternal. In his essay on love, Shelley writes that in every human being there is the driving capacity to love and that if the need to love is driven out of the mortal frame, the being becomes “…the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk of what once he was.”

Percival Bysshe Shelley certainly needed love. Whether this stemmed from the lack of substantial motherly love during his childhood or not one could argue, but it was this need that put great strains upon his personal relationships throughout his years. Despite all his troubles in understanding love, it is certainly true that of all the Romantic poets, Shelley more than any other, discussed, analysed and philosophized about the concept and perhaps, just perhaps, eventually did comprehend the emotional maze more than most.

 

Keats

The second of my essays published in ‘Poetic Hours’.

A third, remains in a folder in a muddled form of extensive notes and quotes and hopefully, will be finished at some stage, in defence of Lord Byron, as a poet of equal stature to Keats and Shelley.

WRIT IN WATER

“If I should die, I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make my friends proud of my memory – but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time, I would have made myself much remembered.”
Keats to Fanny Brawne, March 1820

John Keats wrote the above words to the only woman he deeply loved, less than one year before he died, when in an almost desperate state of melancholic confusion, brought on by a ferocious attack of tuberculosis which eventually killed him. Some observers would state that they were merely the words of a depressed young man racked by illness and prone to melodrama, and indeed, these observers would be partially correct. However, with Keats it was more than mere melodrama brought on by his illness, as throughout the short life and even shorter literary career of the poet one can find examples of his pre-occupation with fame and the fear of failure time and time again.

Born in 1795, the son of a livery stable manager, his family and social history was modest in comparison with contemporaries such as Byron or Shelley, but nevertheless, his education was a good one and he was apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon at an early age. He was actually licensed to practise in 1816 but gave up a career in medicine for one in literature and devoted himself almost entirely to poetry. Even as a youth of fourteen, Keats was reading widely and discussing the “classics” with his tutors. He was swiftly enamoured with Shakespeare, Virgil and Milton, and broadened his reading to include Spenser and Coleridge, amongst others. At the age of nineteen he wrote his first serious poem entitled An Imitation of Spenser.

Thus Keats’ brief poetical life lasted a matter of a mere five or six years and in that short span of time his initial idealistic fervour was crushed into a harsh, pessimistic view of his own work, despite the obvious beauty of his poems. Of course, in his personal life Keats had more than his fair share of upheavals and problems. In 1818, after years of illness, his youngest brother Tom died of tuberculosis, and Keats had watched on in pain and frustration as the terrible disease took control month after month. His other brother, George, moved to America to begin a new life with his wife, and the poet hardly ever gained the chance to see his sister at all. Financially, Keats was never secure and he moved lodgings many, many times, unable to settle in any one place for too long. Never particularly healthy, the poet realised years before he died that he too had been struck with the illness which had slain his brother and the prospect of longevity was stripped mercilessly from his mind.

If all these factors and indeed, many other less stark but equally perturbing cases are considered, it is not surprising that Keats decided that only in the fantasy realms of literature can true love and happiness appear. One can detect an almost stoical resilience to the sometimes cruel hand of fate in Keats, but this stoicism rarely lasted long and he would languish in melancholic suffering and depressed moods for days, exasperating friends as he did so. However, after all the various reasons outside of his poetry for him to become depressed have been analysed, it was in his chosen field of expertise that he suffered the cruellest blows.

His real sense of suffering began in 1817 when his first published collection, Poems, was released. Largely ignored by the literary set, it succeeded only in gaining Keats the reputation of being one of the Cockney School (a derisory term used by numerous journals and magazines to ridicule Leigh Hunt and his poetical friends, of whom Keats was one). Keats managed to retain his dignity in the face of the insults, remarking in a matter-of-fact way to Abbey, his erstwhile guardian who mocked his work, that his book:
“….was read by some dozen of my friends who lik’d it; and some dozen who I was unacquainted with who did not.”

Maintaining his composure in public, Keats however, as one would expect, was upset and angry and rather than allowing the jeering ones to win, he set about a second publication immediately in a state of agitation, explaining almost cryptically to Haydon, a close friend, that:
“Byron, Scott, Southey and Shelley think they are to lead the age, but…”

Thus his second volume, Endymion, was released in 1818. Keats’ fervent indignation though, had softened as the publication date neared and he even drafted an explanatory preface to hopefully avoid any vicious onslaughts by the literary press. Unfortunately even before Endymion had been published the poet had been chosen for critical execution by the widely read “Blackwood’s Magazine”, amongst others. More reviewers followed its lead and the demoralising, sometimes brutal, attacks struck the sensitivity of Keats deeply. At this juncture, more than at any other in his life time did the young man look at the world through jaundiced eyes. It was a savage blow from which, despite his bravado and determination, his pride would never truly recover.

Again, however, we can proudly observe the willingness of Keats to prove the critics wrong and to continue his work passionately. 1819 proved to be an auspicious year for the writer and it would be almost laughable, were the circumstances more comical, that it was after months of bruising insults that Keats wrote some of the greatest lyric poems in history of English literature.

The Odes, which began with Psyche and its allusions to his distaste and disgust at the real world, progressed with On a Grecian Urn with its morbidly beautiful lines about death and mortality, for example:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”
which I personally use as a quotation even now, more than any other.

The transience of beauty was a theme continued in To a Nightingale where the poet almost seems to wish for a loss of consciousness, as his imagination is more vital and much safer than living in his actual existence. He concluded with On Melancholy and On Indolence, again portraying the facts that the “truest” state of being is passive but alert, speculative but receptive.

It is strange and even a little ironic that Keats himself was not particularly aware of the beauty which existed in the odes he had created, as his mind was by now in a continual state of confusion about his own talent in the face of adversity. It was not that Keats doubted his abilities as a poet; it was more that he was incapable of writing for the mass public, like Byron who was achieving huge success, nor could he enter the literary set, as they disapproved of his work. He claimed to a friend that:
“My name with the literary fashionables is vulgar; I am a weaver boy to them….”

Deciding to focus his attention strictly on his work and his time on a few close friends, Keats worded extremely hard on his third, and what would be his last volume which remained and in spite of the opposition, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and other poems was published in 1820.

Oblivious to the reviews as he professed that he no longer cared what the critics would write, the book was nowhere near as badly received as Endymion, but this volume too was largely ignored and it is both sad and slightly unbelievable that when Keats died the following year, his total sales made no great figure. It was decades after his untimely death that the world would know Keats for what he was: a poetical genius and one of the greatest poets that England has ever produced. It is therefore rather distressing that, even on his death bed, he believed that his poetry would be quickly forgotten and bade Joseph Severn, the artist who accompanied him to Italy that the inscription upon his tomb should read:

“Here lies one whose name was writ in water”