blackswaneuroparedux: Life to him would be death to me.- John Keats on John MiltonFor students of li
blackswaneuroparedux: Life to him would be death to me.- John Keats on John MiltonFor students of literature at least, opening a book to find the margins covered in a proliferation of ink notes with salient passages underlined with an indelible pen can be an infuriating thing. But for some it depends whose writing in the margins and what insights they have jotted down in the margins. In the 19th century such ‘marginalia’ was considered an important form of literary expression and a route to understanding literary works and sharing views about them. And when the marginalia is by the hand of a great poet like John Keats and the book in question is John Keats’ treasured copy of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the sins are forgiven and it becomes a different matter altogether.Keats House is where the poet John Keats (1795-1821) lived from 1818 to 1820. Here he wrote some of his best known poetry, including “Ode to a Nightingale”. The house is a Grade 1 listed building set in a peaceful garden in Hampstead. Keats House put on an exhibition showing off Keats’ copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost in 2019. I was fortunate to go and visit it and was thoroughly impressed. The exhibition examined Keats’s notes to reveal patterns of thought, influential subjects and imagery which can be detected in these and other works.Born in London in 1795, John Keats was orphaned young and, after leaving school at 14, trained as an apothecary surgeon. Though not wealthy, he gave up medicine to dedicate his life to poetry. His first sonnets appeared in 1816 and his first book of poems followed a year later. Unkind critics, the loss of his brothers and his frustrated love for Fanny Brawne were the painful background to his creativity and the outpouring of poetry he produced in 1819 is said to be among the finest in the English language. In early 1820, Keats had shown signs of consumption, and died in Rome a year later, at just 25 years old, leaving behind some of the most famous and loved poems in the English language.The leather-bound copy of Paradise Lost owned by Keats was published in 1807 in two volumes by booksellers W. and J. Deas and it is believed Keats read the poem with his friend and neighbour Charles Wentworth Dilke. When he left London for Rome, Keats gave both volumes to Mrs Dilke and they remained with her family before being part of its eventual bequest to Keats House. And it is a treasure to behold for it stitches together the story of how some of the greatest poets Britain has ever produced related to one another in thoughtful reflection of each other’s works. For Keats’ generation only Spenser and Shakespeare could rival Milton as ‘precursor poets’ for the English Romantics. Paradise lost was a kind of Bible to the Romantics and that most romantic of them, Keats, made no disguise of his love of the poem, riddling his copy with clues, thoughts, emotional reactions and evidence of Milton’s influence on his work. And like reading and revering the Bible, the Romantics ultimate relationship with Milton was most fraught with ideological and other tensions. From Blake’s assertion that Milton was ‘of the devil’s party without knowing it,’ to Shelley’s musings on the ‘strange and natural antithesis’ by which Milton’s poem had become an ideological prop to Church and State conservatives. So for the Romantics the relationship with Milton is arguably the most interesting,Keats’ extensive notes in his well-thumbed copy of the great epic poem reveal an intense study of Milton at a time of his life and career when the young poet was particularly receptive to learning from the finest of their craft. Specifically, Keats is drawn to themes of loss, suffering and mortality. He highlights Eve’s sadness when leaving Paradise and notes passages about separation from loved ones – a dominant feature in Keats’s own life. On the pages of his copy of Paradise Lost, Keats writes, “Milton in every instance pursues his imagination to the utmost…he sees Beauty on the wing, pounces upon it and gorges it to the producing his essential verse…” Elsewhere he gushes with the enthusiasm of the literature undergraduate. “The light and shade – the sort of black brightness…the thousand melancholies and Magnificences of this Page – leaves no room for anything to be said theron, but : ‘so it is’-.” Keats seems to have absorbed some of Milton’s poetry as pure nourishment for his own work. Indeed the impact of Milton’s dense visual and rich sensuous imagery is evident in Keats’s own epic poems, Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. But he also felt other aspects of the influence as a severe irritant to his identity as poet. Critics have concentrated on the period in 1819 when Keats experienced Milton’s influence as an “anxiety,” when, frustrated with the unfinished Hyperion, he wrote to his brother, “Life to him would be death to me”. But I strongly suspect that such critics are reading too much into it. Keats had nothing but admiration for Milton but he recognised too they were both very different kind of poets. In several letters to friends, Keats certainly alludes to Milton a lot. In these private letters one can see Keats’s intelligence as he explores his identification with Milton, and creates the detachment he needed from certain aspects of Milton’s personality and work. Keats did not adopt a single attitude to Milton and hold it. It’s surely more fair to conclude that Keats’ response to Milton changed as his concerns as poet and moral thinker changed. Keats was more of an empiricist in his moral thought than Milton. His famous touchstone for the truth — to feel things on his pulses before judging them — was a consistent method. But, while remaining more empirical than Milton as a moralist, Keats saw Milton as his master in the expression of the sensuous imagination. In the end, Keats and the other English Romantic poets made themselves unruly disciples of Milton, self-consciously reading their master’s epic against the grain. -- source link