Keats the Reader

My name is Ross Wilson,

and I'm a lecturer in the English faculty at

Cambridge University and a fellow here at Trinity College,

And this is going to be a short series of lectures on the poetry of John Keats.

Now it would be conventional in some ways to start such a

series of lectures with a bit of information on keeps his background,

his family, his education, that kind of thing and indeed that is very useful.

But I want to emphasise, in particular Keats as a reader.

So what we might want to think of as

his literary background rather than his familial background.

Actually,

in some ways these things are connected.

So Keats came from a modestly off family,

and unlike a number of the other romantic poets, he wasn't educated at a university.

So we can think of Lord Byron, for instance,

who was educated right here at Trinity or Wordsworth,

who was educated next door at ST John's Cold Bridge

a little bit further down the road at Jesus College.

I suppose that Percy Shelley didn't last very long at University College, Oxford.

He was expelled for writing a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism.

Nevertheless, all of these

all of these poets could be thought of, as in some ways,

educationally privileged in a way that perhaps

Keats wasn't at least on first sight.

Um, all of them certainly were enormously prodigious readers,

So Coleridge described himself as a library cormorant.

After the bird who gobbles down huge quantities of fish,

he gobbled down huge quantities of books

and Wordsworth to demonstrate that he didn't actually despise the poets.

Dryden and Pope said.

I have many lines of their verse off by heart,

so their education led to great reading.

And so one might suppose that because kids didn't have quite the advantage,

is that they did that.

He wasn't a great reader,

but in fact he really was.

And it's one of the most important things I think about his poetry,

the quantity of his reading and the character.

The flavour of that reading comes through very strongly in his verse.

It's also true that he did. He did enjoy a pretty good education.

His parents did afford to send him away to a

really quite progressive in some ways perhaps quite radical school.

The Enfield Academy, where he was taken under the wing of the headmasters son,

Charles.

Captain Clarke, who encouraged his reading.

And Keith worked very hard on reading while he was at that academy.

Um, he read, according to Karen Clark, everything that was in the library.

And when he was reading, Clark says he was, and I'm quoting here,

entirely absorbed by his reading.

Indeed, Keats tells us that he read Shakespeare's Hamlet 40 times.

He was a devotee of Spencer's, the Fairy Queen, an enormous Elizabethan poem,

Spencer's great attempt to epic and a lot of other Elizabethan writers

And, of course, also Milton's Paradise Lost was fundamental to his formation,

and indeed, the presence of that text

in something like Keats.

Hyperion is very interesting, slightly fraught question.

But it wasn't just English authors, of course, that were important to Keats.

He read the classical authors, Virgil in particular,

and Italian authors like Taso.

His Jerusalem Eli burrata that keeps

new largely through Fairfax is Renaissance translation

and, of course, Boccaccio as well. The great Italian

prose writer,

whose acknowledged as the source for the story of Isabella all the pot of Basil

Keith,

tells us, doesn't he that he has read a lot.

For instance, at the beginning of on first looking into Chapman's homer homer,

of course.

The great classical writer, author of The Iliad and The Odyssey,

and George Chapman,

another of those Renaissance English writers that

keeps so loved who translated Homer's poetry

and Keith says at the beginning of that poem,

much have I travelled in the realms of gold and many goodly states and kingdoms seen

round many western islands have I been which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

So he's telling us here really, how much he has read.

But I think the emphasis of this poem

is not really so much on the vast quantity of Keith's reading,

really important as that is to him,

but rather on what we might like to call something

like the moment of reading or the scene of reading.

That's what's really important to this poem,

and Keats is asking here and in some ways answering what it is like to read something

that becomes really important in your intellectual formation or

for keeps in his formation as a poet.

He trying to put his finger on what it feels like

to read something that has a decisive influence on our lives,

really,

And that's, I think, a really important question, an important insight

not just for kids as a poet, but for us as his readers.

Keats is offering us one way of reading that

we might he perhaps hopes adopt in reading him.

So he goes on to describe this this moment of reading. I'll read the rest of the poem

oft of one wide expanse.

Had I been told that deep browed Homer ruled as his demean, yet did I never breathe?

It's pure serene,

till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold,

then felt I like some watcher of the skies when a

new planet swims into his ken or like stout Cortez when,

with eagle eyes, he stared at the Pacific

and all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise,

silent

upon a peak in Darien.

Now,

what is important about this is that this moment of reading this moment

of first looking into Chapman's homer is a striking and decisive moment.

It is a discovery. It adds knowledge to us.

So it's like an astronomer watching the skies

and discovering a new planet Shortly before this.

In fact,

the new planets have been discovered and keeps his time,

and he was aware of those discoveries.

It's like exploring and then coming across the Pacific after a long journey,

we'll come back to this poem and will also come back. I think the question

of whether Kit's reading is envisaged here as

solitary, whether it is just Keats

in a room by himself reading this poem or whether in fact,

it is something that takes place in the company of others.

So on the one hand, we might think that the Watcher of the Skies is all alone

in his or her, perhaps room at night.

But then Cortes certainly is with his men,

who all look at each other with a wild sumaiya.

So they, in some ways sharing this discovery.

And I want in one of the later sections to think about Keats

in relationship to society, in relationship to other people

and keep it as a poet in that role. So we'll certainly come back to that

Killed in.

Clark keeps his friend and mentor at his school, said that when Keats read Milton,

he was like a young horse ramping through a spring meadow.

So there's a certain ease and facility to keep his reading

that Clark wanted to emphasis.

But reading isn't always easily accomplished, though,

and I think we can already see that in on first.

Looking into Chapman's homer,

people looking for new planets spend long hours staring out into the blank dark sky.

Explorers have difficult journeys to find the Pacific there.

Often frustrated, they exert and exhaust themselves.

They're unsure of what they'll find.

Kate is also interested, I think,

in what we can't read of what is closed to us as readers now.

And he's interested in that experience as much as

he is in the experience of reading as discovery.

And here I think we can turn to Hyperion,

which is, of course, a poem about a world that is passing that is no longer what it was.

And in many ways we can't have access to that world anymore.

In some ways, that poem is about that, and again I'll come back to this,

But in particular,

there are things that we cannot read that keeps

wants us to pay attention to in this poem.

In Book one, about 260 odd lines in Hyperion

is going out to illuminate the universe.

And Keith rates this

the planet orb of fire, where on he road each day from east to west,

the heavens through

spun round in sable Curtin ng of clouds

not therefore veiled, quite blindfold and head,

but ever and non. The glancing spheres,

circles and arcs and broad belting Collier

glowed through and wrought upon the muffling dark,

sweet shape id lightnings from the nad ear.

Deep up to the zenith.

Hire a graphics old which SAGES and keen eyed astrologers,

then living on the earth with labouring thought one from the gaze of many centuries

now lost.

Save what we find on remnants, huge of stone or marble Swart,

their import gone,

their wisdom long since fled.

And so what keeps is concerned with here is a kind of writing,

which is also a kind of discovery that we can no longer read.

And, of course, this bit here is concerned with writing,

and so many of Kate's scenes of reading are also scenes of writing.

And that's what I want to go on to think about now.

In the next section that is Keats, the writer