Give Keats a Chance

 Not very far into the recording of last night's early hours showing of Three Sisters on the Talking Pictures channel, the postman arrived with a bonanza bundle of four books but not the Mozart disc. 2 x Graham Swift, All Passion Spent by Auntie Vita and Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Benjamin Britten fill up the next few weeks quite rewardingly, one confidently expects, then.

Three Sisters, from 1970, with Larry, Joan Plowright and Alan Bates was probably the pick of my recent ChekhovFest being hugely quotable and, in common with a number of contemporaries, full of provincial paralysis (cf. Dubliners, Ibsen, Strindberg). 

In the days of hiatus before the minor avalanche of new reading matter I had availed myself of the collection upstairs and downstairs fitfully until spending this morning with the Romantic Poets, trying to gather evidence to dismiss them less lightly. I avoid them, along with Dryden, Pope and Milton, only slightly more circumspectly than I do the plague and one ought to find more in them of worth because some people like them so it can't be for me to denigrate them. There are various species of C20th, often American, poet I can't tune into, plus Whitman and then Edmund Spenser seems unreadable but I'd prefer to come here to celebrate the good rather than descry that that I don't see the point of.

 

I had begun with a Selected Byron last night and it wasn't promising. It's far too obvious to say it's overdone. One might take She Walks in Beauty if one was editing a magazine and Darkness is compelling in its vivid way if you can suspend disbelief enough to take it on its own terms but I simply don't have the stamina for canto after canto of the longer poems. Of all those of his generation that gave poetry the bad name that still prevails in places two hundred years later it's his fault more than the others but 'poetry' is the words, the sound it makes and what they achieve and so one ought not to hold the poet's personality against the poems themselves.

I've studiously given Blake a wide berth all my life with the special exceptions of Jerusalem and London. Prophets, Seers and Sages and vague mysticism might have served the whimsy of Marc Bolan before he outgrew John Peel's Perfumed Garden but it convinces less as poetry in our more sceptical times notwithstanding that Blake himself was well-intentioned. The poetry doesn't live up to the vision but the sometimes child-like rhyme schemes perhaps passed as authentic in his day and, as anybody who was the very height of avant-garde exploration in their day comes to know, it doesn't all look quite as good to later generations who weren't there at the time.

Like all of these people, and far too many poets throughout the ages, Wordsworth took himself seriously and, like others, superstar status in his lifetime did him no favours. It was the Lucy poems I read of his and found some satisfaction in, as well as the meditations of Tintern Abbey. I don't blame anybody for trying to identify with 'nature' and finding themselves not quite as much a part of it as they would like. But it remains 'precious', as they all are, and a question we might all struggle with.

We can also give Wordsworth, 'The child is the father of the man', which might seem more like Blake, and he makes more music than Byron does.

There is a Venn diagram to be made in which the interlocking circles are respectively Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know, in which Byron at least occupies the central intersection on the authority of Lady Caroline Lamb who ought to know. It's not for me to say that Wordsworth was mad but I don't know if his girlfriend in Paris benefitted from meeting him.

Although at the time I saw no benefit of being given poetry to learn by heart for homework at school, I have long since appreciated being given the opening lines of Kubla Khan to learn and dutifully doing so rather than cheating as I subsequently did, aged 12 or 13. And I entirely accept Coleridge's story about the man from Porlock because I've dreamed poems, or thought I had, and not been able to retrieve those masterpieces once awake again. All students are grateful to him now for the standard one hour lectures that had gone on and on for much longer before he needed to stop for his opium fix and other lecturers followed his abbreviated example. But one remains grateful to Mr.Thomas, who taught us second form English, for imprinting the rhythms and sound of such a poem ineradicably on those of us who learnt it, for its own sake, despite him being otherwise the English teacher who nearly made me stay with mathematics.

Keats has somehow always seemed to have an exemption from much of the disregard one might have for Romantic Poetry. Since he can write lines like 'season of mists and mellow fruitfulness' or 'thou still unravished bride of quietness' then one is less bothered that, put under any sort of scrutiny, truth and beauty are not the same thing. As with the less demanding discipline of pop music, if it sounds good that's all that matters, never mind what it means. These poets have become caricatures of themselves by now which in Keats's case might not have been entirely his fault but, since he had an exemption of sorts, I didn't look at him again today.

But maybe Shelley has his moments. I immediately sympathized with him when his phrase about 'bloodless food' was annotated in the volume I had at University 40 years ago with, 

Shelley was a notorious vegetarian.

While I can appreciate that one can be both notorious and a vegetarian, it surely cannot follow that simply being vegetarian can make one notorious. 

While being reported by everybody that met him as being gorgeous to know, he writes himself up in the same poem, Alastor, as 

The poet wandering on, through Arabie

And Persia, and the wild Carminian waste

until,

Beside a sparkling rivulet he stretched

His languid limbs.

which is as horrific as any C21st poet still clinging to some avant-garde stylings from the 1960's but that is how they see themselves.

Earlier in the same poem he has impressed with,

When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness,

Like an inspired and desperate alchymist

Staking his very life on some dark hope, 

and since his life reads like the very epitome of what a poet might have been able to be two hundred years ago, rather than attending conferences on University campus sites on an expenses budget, and neither perhaps as needy as a waster like Baudelaire, the next tranche of books to arrive will include 700 pages of biography of him, the life being likely to be more readable than the yards of poetry.

But perhaps in some ways they weren't on the whole as bad as I had thought.

What they didn't seem able to do was take themselves out of their own poems. Of course, nobody can do that entirely but one can at least try.