Keats and Byron
‘THE best biography of John Keats . . . was written by himself, all unconscious of what he was doing,’ said the late H. Buxton Forman, editor in chief of Keats’s prose and verse. It may have been this dictum that gave Earle Vonard Weller the idea of arranging the poet’s letters and essays into a touching narrative, The Autobiography of John Keats (Stanford University Press, $5.00), in the poet’s own vivid, nervous prose.
His friends Hayden, Clarke, Leigh Hunt, are painted for us in quick, often humorous strokes. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Hazlitt appear briefly, though long enough to afford us a glimpse of them clothed in the plain serge of life. The youth whom women did not like comes vividly before us in all his awkwardness and male resentment. We see at fast a definite woman, coming to take full possession of that mind. How will she react to ‘Mister John Keats, five feet high,’ an unsuccessful poet and already marked by a fatal illness? Fanny Brawne was all woman where Keats would have had her a goddess; hence his share of joy was not without its taste of anguish. ‘I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days,’ he cries with foreboding of his early death. ‘ Three such days with her I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.’ Neither those three summer days nor the fifty years were to be his. Saddened by his love and by his poetry which the critics had turned into an unkinder mistress, he was not loath to die. ‘ I have left no immortal work behind me,’ he despaired, after his last volume. Here at last, thanks to Mr. Weller’s managerial ingenuity, we see Keats as he portrayed himself.
Simultaneous with the ’autobiography ’ comes Keats’ Craftsmanship, a study in poetic development, by M.R. Ridley (Oxford University Press, $5.00), showing the fervid mind at work. Some of the notes for the sources Mr. Ridley says were in an unpublished thesis of his wife’s, and with these riches ‘pyramidally but not otherwise extant’ he has adorned his text. No matter whose the credit, this scholarly and well-written work may lay claim to doing for Keats, though within a more limited compass, what Professor Lowes did for Coleridge in his Road to Xanadu. The volume of 1820 containing the poet’s mature work is dealt with in detail with reference to sources, metric schemes, first essays, and corrections. Keats’s mind is shown at work, selecting, changing, altering again, until a mediocre line is transmuted to enduring beauty — for Keats was one of those whose revisions stamped into perfect shape the forms he threw off in the heat of inspiration. Mr. Ridley shows himself at his best in the interpretation of passages that have been stumblingblocks in the way of Keats scholars. While duly appreciating the worth of Amy Lowell’s work, Mr. Ridley corrects a number of errors she was led to make in her zest to overthrow the theory of other scholars.
‘ The Edinburgh praises Jack Keats or Ketch, or whatever his names are: why, his is the** of Poetry. . . . Such like is the trash they praise, and such will be the end of the ** poesy of this miserable Self-Polluter of the human mind.’ So wrote Lord Byron to his publisher, — let me say quickly that he changed his opinions later, — and so we find it, with asterisks where Byron was outspoken, in the Letters of Lord Byron, selected by R. G. Howarth (Dutton, $3.00). The passage is illustrative both of Byron’s frank epistolary style and of the editor’s cautious decency. From the biographical piety of Moore to Mr. Howarth’s discreetness, such has been the fate of Byron the prose writer, though in justice to the present editor it must be said that, where Moore omitted whole paragraphs, he contents himself with a sprinkling of asterisks. It is interesting to observe in the present edition that there is no note of explanation to letter number 45, to Lady Caroline Lamb. Among the three hundred or more from Byron’s pen, it stands out glaringly both in style and in matter as the forgery the most reputable Byron students claim it to be. Since it is in his letters that we find Byron divested of his Lara and Don Juan trappings, it would serve him better were editors less concerned with omissions and concealments.
FRANCES WINWAR