Lives of the Great Romantics, Part II, Volume 1

Keats, Coleridge and Scott by their Contemporaries

John Mullan, Ralph Pite, Fiona Robertson, Jenny Wallace

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138754485
• eBook ISBN: 9781000748253
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria femminista

In this second collection of biographical accounts of Romantic writers, the characters of Keats, Coleridge and Scott are recalled by their contemporaries, offering insights into their lives and writings, as well as into the art of 19th-century biography.

Barry Cornwall, ‘Town Conversation’, London Magazine (April 1821)

 

 

In many ways, the following obituary offered no more than another blow in the long-running squabble amongst literary magazines. The London Magazine, in which the article first appeared, had become associated indirectly with Keats and his treatment by critics since the infamous Scott-Christie duel in February 1821 (see introduction). The magazine had been set up, in 1820, in direct opposition to the tory Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. It was Blackwood’s which had carried the series of ‘Cockney Poets’ reviews, which, together with John Wilson Croker’s articles in the Quarterly, constituted the most ferocious and notorious attacks on Keats. Francis Jeffrey had written a defence of Keats in the Edinburgh Review, Blackwood’s Scottish rival, but only in 1820, a couple of years after the initial damaging reviews. The obituary enters into the quarrel by recalling the Edinburgh Review as endorsement and by suggesting that Keats’s work is a ‘test’ of literary (and political) taste. But there is also a sense in which it is concerned to establish Keats’s reputation beyond the narrow political squabble, to introduce Keats’s poetry to first time readers and to set the agenda for ways in which his poetry will be read in the future.

The author of the obituary was Bryan Waller Procter. Procter, known by the bizarrely unracy literary pseudonym Barry Cornwall, would now be called one of the greatest ‘networkers’ of the early nineteenth century. Indeed, Coventry Patmore, Procter’s biographer, when trying to sum up the main incidents of his subject’s life, concluded that ‘his friendships may be regarded as its events’ (Patmore (1877), p. 6). He was born into a family moving upwards socially. His father began his career as a tradesman and finished it living on independent means, with substantial income from property. Educated at Harrow with Lord Byron and Robert Peel, Procter was articled to solicitors, spent about ten years devoted to full-time writing, and then returned to law, serving as the Metropolitan Commissioner of Lunacy and drawing upon the income of his father’s houses. In 1820 he was one of the founding members and writers of the London Magazine, along with Charles Lamb, Thomas de Quincey and William Hazlitt. It was through Scott’s successor as editor of the London Magazine, John Taylor – Keats’s publisher – that Procter heard the news of Keats’s death. The London Magazine marked a crucial turning point in his already active social life. As he admitted in his old age to an American disciple, James T. Fields, ‘All the “best talent” (to use a modern advertisement phrase) wrote for [the London Magazine] and to have a prose or poetical article in the “London” entitled a man to be asked to dine out anywhere in society in those days’ (Fields, (1876), p. 59). Indeed, after his marriage in 1824 to the daughter of Mrs Basil Montague, his house became the chief centre of London literary society, and by the time of his death in 1874, he had met and known nearly all the main writers of the previous hundred years.

In the years between 1815 and 1823, Procter published a profusion of poems and was dubbed by one magazine the ‘poetical rival of Mr Keats’ (Eclectic Review, September 1820). Certainly he seems to have been considered one of Blackwood’s ‘Cockney Poets’, often reviewed together with Keats and damningly associated with the denigrated Leigh Hunt. Hunt compounded this association by including Barry Cornwall’s poems in his Literary Pocket Book, alongside poems by Keats, Shelley and himself. And yet Procter did not incur the same wrath from the critics, being often favourably contrasted with Keats. This lack of criticism might be explained by the fact that Procter was now considered to belong to a different class and so, like the aristocratic Shelley, was distinguished, in Lockhart’s mind, from the humbler Hunt and Keats. But it could also have been designed to annoy Keats still further. Shelley’s and Byron’s adverse reactions to Procter’s ‘imitative’ poetry suggest that being considered worse than Procter was poor praise indeed. (Shelley, Letters, 21 March 1821; 4 May 1821; Byron, LJ, 7 June 1820).

Whatever his contemporary poets’ private opinion of his poetry, Procter was generously disposed towards them and their work. He asked Leigh Hunt to take him over to Hampstead and introduce him to Keats, whom he was to see once or twice more before he left for Italy in September. While Keats admitted privately to some difficulty in reconciling his ‘esteem’ of his new friend’s ‘kindness’ with his opinion of his poetry (To Fanny Brawne, Letters, II, p. 267; 27 February 1820), Procter was obliviously enthusiastic, admitting in a private reminiscence published after his death that he had ‘never encountered a more manly and simple young man’, that ‘it would be difficult to discover a man with a more bright and open countenance’, and that he was a ‘great admirer of his poetry, which is charming and original; full of sentiment, full of beauty’ (Patmore, (1877), pp. 201–2).

The obituary is surprisingly formal in tone. It does not admit to personal acquaintance with the poet, or indulge in the physical description to be found in Procter’s private reminiscence. Rather, the impersonal tone allows the stereotypical picture of the tragic young poet to come across more forcefully. Keats, divested of too many personal details, is more easily fitted into a certain type with which the public has become familiar – ‘self-consuming meteors’ or poets who die young. The adjectives used to describe Keats are applied without much specificity – ‘young’, ‘solitary’, ‘helpless’ – while the quotation from ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ identifies the poet’s life with his work in a conventional way. The only anecdote vaguely worthy of the name is the account of Severn at Keats’s deathbed, discussing the inscription for his grave. Interestingly, this article must be one of the first pieces of writing in which the now conventional connection between the three younger Romantics – Byron, Shelley and Keats – is noted: ‘he was one of three English poets who had been compelled by circumstances to adopt a foreign country as their own’.

Procter’s account was reproduced in Imperial Magazine (December 1821), John Millard’s annual Times Telescope (January 1822), and the Boston Athenaeum (March 1822), and as a result it had a considerable and important impact. One of the chief side-effects of the article and its only anecdote, particularly in America, was to encourage a growing number of tourists to make pilgrimages to Rome, to visit the Protestant cemetary and to see one of the most famous tombstone epitaphs (see extract from Severn, Atlantic Monthly).

TOWN CONVERSATION.
No. IV.
DEATH OF MR. JOHN KEATS.

WE commence our article this month with but a melancholy subject—the death of Mr. John Keats.—It is, perhaps, an unfit topic to be discussed under this head, but we knew not where else to place it, and we could not reconcile ourselves to the idea of letting a poet’s death pass by in the common obituary. He died on the 23rd of February, 1821, at Rome, whither he had gone for the benefit of his health. His complaint was a consumption, under which he had languished for some time, but his death was accelerated by a cold caught in his voyage to Italy.

Mr. Keats was, in the truest sense of the word, A Poet.—There is but a small portion of the public acquainted with the writings of this young man; yet they were full of high imagination and delicate fancy, and his images were beautiful and more entirely his own, perhaps, than those of any living writer whatever. He had a fine ear, a tender heart, and at times great force and originality of expression; and notwithstanding all this, he has been suffered to rise and pass away almost without a notice: the laurel, has been awarded (for the present) to other brows: the bolder aspirants have been allowed to take their station on the slippery steps of the temple of fame, while he has been nearly hidden among the crowd during his life, and has at last died, solitary and in sorrow, in a foreign land.

It is at all times difficult, if not impossible, to argue others into a love of poets and poetry: it is altogether a matter of feeling, and we must leave to time (while it hallows his memory) to do justice to the reputation of Keats. There were many, however, even among the critics living, who held his powers in high estimation; and it was well observed by the Editor of the Edinburgh Review, that there was no other Author whatever, whose writings would form so good a test by which to try the love which any one professed to bear towards poetry.

When Keats left England, he had a presentiment that he should not return: that this has been too sadly realized the reader already knows.—After his arrival in Italy, he revived for a brief period, but soon afterwards declined, and sunk gradually into his grave. He was one of three English poets who had been compelled by circumstances to adopt a foreign country as their own. He was the youngest, but the first to leave us. His sad and beautiful wish is at last accomplished: It was that he might drink “of the warm south,” and “leave the world unseen,”—and—(he is addressing the nightingale)—

“And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou amongst the leaves hast never known,

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,

Where youth grows pale, and [[word not legible]], and dies;

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

  And leaden-eyed despairs,

Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous-eyes,

  Or new love pine at them beyond tomorrow.”

A few weeks before he died, a gentleman who was sitting by his bed-side, spoke of an inscription to his memory, but he declined this altogether,—desiring that there should be no mention of his name or country; “or if any,” said he, “let it be—Here lies the body of one whose name was writ in water!”—There is something in this to us most painfully affecting; indeed the whole story of his later days is well calculated to make a deep impression.—It is to he hoped that his biography will be given to the world, and also whatever he may have left (whether in poetry or prose) behind him. The public is fond of patronizing poets: they are considered in the light of an almost helpless race: they are bright as stars, but like meteors

“Short-lived and self-consuming.”

We do not claim the patronage of the public for Mr. Keats, but we hope that it will now cast aside every little and unworthy prejudice, and do justice to the high memory of a young but undoubted poet. L.

Shelley, Adonais (Pisa, 1821)

Shelley’s Adonais proved to be the most important influence upon the development of Keats’s reputation in the nineteenth century (Wolfson, (1995)) and any anthology which omitted it would seriously misrepresent Keats’s ‘after-fame’. Commentators on Keats were soon quoting from Shelley’s poem and one later biographer of Keats, Dorothy Hewlett, actually gave her book the title Adonais. As a result of the poem, the notion that Keats’s early death had been caused by harsh reviews became firmly fixed in criticism of his poems. The impact of the poem also meant that Keats and Shelley were always to be closely linked in the public mind. The review of Adonais in the Literary Register, for example, commented on the ‘remarkable coincidence’ of Shelley’s death when the ‘breath which uttered that lamentation [for Keats] was scarcely cool on the poet’s lip’ (Lite...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Bibliography
• Chronology
• Copy Texts
• 1. Cornwall, Barry, ‘Town Conversation’
• 2. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Adonais
• 3. Reynolds, John Hamilton, The Garden of Florence
• 4. Hunt, Leigh, Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries
• 5. William Maginn, ‘Novels of the Season’
• 6. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Specimens of the Table Talk
• 7a. Dendy, Walter Cooper, The Philosophy of Mystery
• 7b. Dendy, Walter Cooper, Legends of the Lintel and the Ley
• 8. Medwin, Thomas, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley
• 9. Milnes, Richard Monckton, Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats
• 10. Hunt, Leigh, Autobiography
• 11. Haydon, Benjamin Robert, The Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon
• 12. Clarke, Charles Cowden, ‘Recollections of Keats’
• 13. Severn, Joseph, ‘On the Vicissitudes of Keats’s Fame’
• 14. Clarke, Charles Cowden and Mary, ‘Recollections of Writers’
• 15. Richardson, Sir Benjamin, ‘An Esculapian Poet - John Keats’
• 16. Severn, Joseph, ‘Journals and Reminiscences’
• 17. Brown, Charles, The Life of John Keats
• Notes