John Keats: A Retrospective Poem by Ron Price

JOHN KEATS

Coming in at last from the Periphery

Part 1:

In the sixties, when I was just beginning my poetic life, three scholarly biographies of the poet John Keats appeared within a short time. They were: W.J. Bate’s and Aileen Ward’s, both in 1963, and Robert Gittings’s in 1968. Each is still very useful; all were admirable, if in different ways. W.J. Bate, who had been interested in Keats ever since he wrote his undergraduate thesis on the poet in 1939, paid special attention to Keats’s stylistic development in a discussion that has never been bettered.

Aileen Ward brought to the study of Keats an almost clairvoyant psychological understanding, drawing on, but by no means limited to, Freudian insights. Robert Gittings who, before he wrote the biography, had published three short books on Keats, displayed an unexampled mastery of the facts of Keats’s life and its English context.

Part 2:

I was far too busy, during the 1960s, getting my B.A., my B. Ed. in the social sciences and in education studies, starting my career in teaching and my life in my first marriage, sorting out my pioneering-travelling trajectory for and in the Canadian Baha’i community, and dealing with the first episodes, the rigours, of bipolar disorder. The poetry of John Keats was far out on the periphery of my intellectual and academic life, my reading and my first pretensions at scholarly work.-Ron Price with thanks to Helen Vendler, “Inspiration, Accident, Genius: A Review of Andrew Motions’s 1997 book Keats, in the London Review of Books, Vol.19 No.20,16 October 1997.

My poetic life did not really
take-off until the ‘90s when
Andrew Motions’ Keats1 was
finally published, but it would
be another 15 years before I was
able to finally appreciate the work
of this poet who has come down to
us in an inevitably incomplete state.

Life has been busy even in retirement
from FT, PT, life’s more casual work,
all that volunteer stuff that kept me as
far as possible from any serious study.

But, at last, in the evening of my life,
I can finally get my teeth into works
of more writers and authors, poets &
publishers than I ever knew existed.

Ron Price
6/10/’13.

Part 3:

1 Thirty years have passed since those three studies of Keats during the 1960s. During those 30 years my life has taken more directions, more studies, life in more towns and communities, more relationships: deep and meaningful, shallow and trivial than I could possibly summarize in this small space. Keats remained outside the ambit of my interest inventory and study.

Andrew Motion makes the remark, reasonably enough, in the Introduction to his new life of Keats, that ‘the lives of all important writers need to be reconsidered at regular intervals, no matter how familiar they might be’. And a good thing that is, too.

“The Keats that has come down to us, ” says Motion, “is finely figured, yet incomplete. Embedding his life in his times, I have tried to re-create him in a way which is more rounded than his readers are used to seeing. Examining his liberal beliefs, I have tried to show how they shaped the argument as well as the language of his work. At all times, I have tried to illuminate his extraordinary skill in reconciling ‘thoughts’ with ‘sensations’.

Part 4:

‘Embedding his life in his times’ turns out to mean, says poetry critic Helen Vendler, “drawing attention to Keats’s political opinions and his class status; showing how his liberal beliefs ‘shaped the argument as well as the language of his work’ turns out to mean interpreting the poems – especially the longer poems – as documents of political thought embodied in styles suitable to liberal expression; and ‘illuminating his skill in reconciling “thoughts” with “sensations” ’ turns out to mean almost anything the author needs it to mean in any given chapter.”

Motion adds the following remark, dissociating himself as the remark does, from the deterministic convictions of materialist biography and criticism:

Accounts of Keats’s reading, his friendships, his psychological imperatives, his poetic ‘axioms’, his politics and his context can never completely explain his marvellous achievement. The story of his life must also allow for other things, things which have become embarrassing or doubtful for many critics in the late 20th century, but which are still, as they always were, actual and undeniable: inspiration, accident, genius.