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Down with the Sparrows. The span of his creative life was incredibly brief. At 18, still apprenticed to the surgeon, he was barely able to imitate second-rate writers like Leigh Hunt, and was proud of such dreadful lines as "Ah God, she is like a milk white lamb that bleats." In the next four years, he completed a verse play and nearly all of the poems that were to establish him among the immortals. And in his letters, he wrote about what poetry could do and evolved a new poetic theory.
Romantic theory and practice glorified individual feeling and self-expression. Keats rejected what he called this "Wordsworthian egotistical sublime." Instead he sought to be a "chameleon poet," who is submerged in his subject through "empathy"—the projecting of one's self into the feelings of others, even such slight creatures as sparrows scrabbling for crumbs in the street, or a field mouse peeping out of a field's withered grass. "Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated," he wrote to Sister Fanny, "the energies displayed in it are fine. . . This is the very stuff of poetry."
Perilous Desolation. These theories, which might have made Keats the first modern poet 100 years ahead of time if he had lived to carry them out, far outstripped his poetic practice. But they provide a fascinating commentary on the elegant debate that he carried on with himself in poem after poem. It grew from his short life's continual conflict between delight in the rich, romantic dream worlds that he was so skilled at creating, and the pull of complex humanity, which he saw but understood art could never fully trap. In his most famous Ode (to a Nightingale), the voice of the bird has touched the hearts of many men and united them in awareness of their common humanity; but it also has lured them into the perilous desolation of an imaginary world where no human face or voice is seen or heard:
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home
She stood in tears amid the alien corn:
The same that ofttimes hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Biographer Bate, Lowell Professor of the Humanities at Harvard, sometimes detours through academic bogs, especially when he is taking the reader by the hand through every well-known poem Keats ever wrote. Aileen Ward, who teaches at Sarah Lawrence, is briefer, less searching, more wrapped up in the psychology of such things as Keats's ambivalent feeling toward women—induced, Miss Ward feels, by his shock when his mother married again barely two months after the death of his father. On many insignificant details—such as whether Keats had syphilis when he wrote Endymion—the two biographers differ sharply (Ward: yes, Bate: no). But they emphatically agree that Fanny Brawne, the girl Keats wanted to marry, was not the heartless flirt that Keats's friends and generations of Keats's sympathizers make her out to be. She loved Keats and was patient with his on-again, off-again courtship.