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to have imbibed his cultural and political values. (Roe's book can be prof–
itably consulted as well on such matters.) "Is presumed," because we have
not much more than a handful of anecdotes to give us the Keats of these
"lost years" before the letters kick in. And, significantly, Keats didn't say
much about his own earlier life, unlike Coleridge, who wrote a series of
autobiographical letters to his friend Thomas Poole.
Here and elsewhere, Motion uncovers Keats's politics by investigating
the company he kept. This is politics by association. For instance, Sir Astley
Cooper, the senior surgeon at Guy's Hospital where Keats received the dis–
tinction of being named a "dresser," had earlier been an outspoken militant
radical. As a surgeon and instructor, Cooper practiced "radicalism by other
means"-through enlightened care of patients and through the value he
placed on physical observation free of conjecture. This must have rubbed off
on Keats. But there's counter-evidence as well: a contemporary would later
say that Keats was off in a dream world scribbling verse during Cooper's lec–
tures. We know he took indifferent notes. Moreover, Keats wasn't dresser to
Cooper but to William Lucas,
Jr.,
a "cack-handed butcher," in Motion's
phrase. And Cooper had agreed, in any event, to be politically muzzled as a
condition of his appointment at the hospital. So how much political con–
sciousness would a dreamy Keats have derived from an erstwhile radical
delivering lectures on surgery? It's a matter of conjecture.
Motion's biography is grounded in a large sympathy with this poet. He
has written movingly about Keats elsewhere. In "Sailing to Italy" (from
Salt Water,
Faber
&
Faber, 1997), an autobiographical piece mingling prose
and poetry, he narrates a voyage he made to Italy in the wake of the
doomed poet. But more so than in some previous biographies, here Keats
tends to fade into his contexts and associates.
The biography may illustrate the perils of wishful reading. We
wish
our
poet to have such and such a politics (for which there's good evidence),
and we
wish
him to channel this politics into his major verse (for which
there's only conjectural evidence). We
wish
to set right the Victorian and
modernist misreading of Keats as disengaged aesthete.
Motion admits of a disjunction between political and poetical dis–
courses: Leigh Hunt himself could write non-political poetry. Motion
doesn't attempt a political reading of "La Belle Dame sans Merci," in
which Keats attempts to escape "the identity-sapping powers of love." The
biography makes clear that it was a
difeat
for a strapped Keats to consider
writing journalism "on the liberal side of the question for whoever will
pay me." He also told Shelley to "curb [his] magnanimity" (his ethico–
political convictions) and be more of a poet. He could, like Leigh Hunt,
maintain a problematic friendship with the painter Benjamin Haydon, an
arch-conservative.
