BOOKS
515
Tracking the Poli tical Keats
KEATS.
By
Andrew Motion.
Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. $35.00
Keats's letters remind us that autobiographical and biographical perspec–
tives are often at odds. We call his letters delightful for the force of
personality they convey, for their improvisational genius, and for the poet's
exhilarating, open pursui t oflas ting fame. From the perspective of his biog–
raphers and most of the rest of us, he has joined the English poets, fulfilling
his best prophecy for himself in these letters.
But Keats could, of course, know nothing of the history of his own
reception, except for its opening chapter of derision in the Tory journals.
We wish we could shout his success to him. From his perspective, the life
he narrates in letters is one of grievous failure. There's considerable per–
formance anxiety even in the exuberant letters of 1817, when he found his
way into the radical journalist Leigh Hunt's circle. Thereafter, in humor
and courage, Keats narrates his "buffeting with circumstance" amid lousy
walking tours and lonely stays in off-season resorts, social claustrophobia,
ill heal th, intense sexual jealousy, false starts in poetry and drama, the aban–
donment of his great ambition, and despair. Following what we like to
term his
annus mirabilis,
during which he had composed the great Odes and
much more, Keats laments that he has "done nothing," that he has left no
immortal work behind him. Happily, he proved a false prophet in thinking
his name writ in water, so a biographer can give the last word instead to
Matthew Arnold: "He is-he is wi th Shakespeare."
Biographers of Keats all reverse the manifest tendency of the autobio–
graphical texts on which they so depend, citing these spirited but often
tormented letters according to a narrative of development, achievement,
and vindication that would have surprised the hapless poet. It is to the
credit of Andrew Motion, poet and author of an award-winning biogra–
phy of Philip Larkin, that Keats's feelings of abject failure are well
conveyed in his new biography. In the pages of this long book, one finds a
short, unhappy life. But it's a notable irony that Motion's Keats comes to
life only when he is dying-when this "Cockney suburban" poet has
stopped writing poetry, has despaired of the "march of passion and
endeavour" that had underwritten his politics, and has begun to sink into
a "posthumous existence."
In
Keats,
Motion draws on the historicist research and criticism of the
1980s and 1990s. Though symptoms of this approach first presented in
Renaissance studies, it's among Romantic scholars and critics that it has
taken hold most stubbornly. The British Romantics from Blake and
