Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-FameColvin, Sidney
General
Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame
Colvin, Sidney
Keats, John, 1795-1821; Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography
Coming back in the first week of October to Hampstead, whither his
brothers had by this time also returned from a trip to Paris, Keats was
presently made uncomfortable by evidences of discord among his friends
and reports of what seemed like disloyalty on the part of one of them,
Leigh Hunt, to himself. Haydon had now left the studio in Great
Marlborough Street for one in Lisson Grove, and the Hunts, having come
away from Hampstead and paid a long late-summer visit to the Shelleys at
Marlow, were lodging near him in the same street. 'Everybody seems at
loggerheads,' Keats writes to Bailey. 'There's Hunt infatuated--there's
Haydon's picture in statu quo--There's Hunt walks up and down his
painting-room--criticizing every head most unmercifully.' Both Haydon
and Reynolds, he goes on, keep telling him tales of Hunt: How Hunt has
been talking flippantly and patronizingly of _Endymion_, saying that if
it is four thousand lines long now it would have been seven thousand but
for him, and giving the impression that Keats stood to him in the
relation of a pupil needing and taking advice. He declares in
consequence that he is quite disgusted with literary men and will never
know another except Wordsworth; and then, more coolly and sensibly,
'now, is not this a most paltry thing to think about?... This is, to be
sure, the vexation of a day, nor would I say so many words about it to
any but those whom I know to have my welfare and reputation at heart.'
During the six or seven autumn weeks spent at Hampstead after his return
from Oxford Keats was getting on, a little flaggingly, with the fourth
book of _Endymion_, besides writing an occasional lyric or two. Fresh
from the steadying and sympathetic companionship of Bailey, he keeps up
their intimacy by affectionate letters in which he discloses much of
that which lay deepest and was best in him. Writing in the first days of
November he congratulates Bailey on having got a curacy in Cumberland
and promises some day to visit him there; says he is in a fair way to
have finished _Endymion_ in three weeks; mentions an idea he has of
shipping his brother Tom, who has been looking worse, off to Lisbon for
the winter and perhaps going with him; and gets in by a side wind a
masterly criticism of Wordsworth's poem _The Gipsies_ and also of
Hazlitt's criticism of it in the _Round Table_. A fragment of another
letter, dated November the 5th, alludes with annoyance, not for the
first time, to some failure of Haydon's to keep his word or take trouble
about a young man from Oxford named Cripps whom he had promised to
receive as pupil and in whom Bailey and Keats were interested. The same
fragment records the appearance in _Blackwood_ (the _Endinburgh
Magazine_, as Keats calls it) of the famous first article of the Cockney
School series, attacking Hunt with a virulence far beyond even the
accustomed licence of the time, and seeming by the motto prefixed to it
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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