Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-FameColvin, Sidney
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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
Apart from his growing sense of the darker sides of human existence and
of the mysteries of good and evil, Keats was suffering at this time from
the pain of a family break-up now imminent. George Keats had made up his
mind to emigrate to America, and embark his capital, or as much of it as
he could get possession of, in business there. Besides the wish to push
his own fortunes, a main motive of this resolve on George's part was the
desire to be in a position as quickly as possible to help or if need be
support, his poet-brother. He persuaded the girl to whom he had long
been attached, Miss Georgiana Wylie, to share his fortunes, and it was
settled that they were to be married and sail early in the summer. Some
of Keats's letters during the last weeks of his stay at Teignmouth are
taken up with his plans for the time immediately following this change.
He wavered for a while between two incompatible purposes. One was to go
for a summer's walking tour through Scotland with Charles Brown. 'I have
many reasons,' he writes to Reynolds, 'for going wonder-ways; to make my
winter chair free from spleen; to enlarge my vision; to escape
disquisitions on poetry, and Kingston-criticism; to promote digestion
and economize shoe-leather.' (How 'economize,' one wonders?) 'I'll have
leather buttons and belt, and if Brown hold his mind, "over the hills we
go." If my books will keep me to it, then will I take all Europe in
turn, and see the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them.' Here we
find Keats in his turn caught by the romance of wild lands and of travel
which had in various ways been so much of an inspiration to Byron and
Shelley before him. A fortnight later we find him inclining to give up
this purpose under an overmastering sense of the inadequacy of his own
attainments, and of the necessity of acquiring knowledge, and ever more
knowledge, to sustain the flight of poetry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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