Imagining a future for John Keats — the novelist

Keats long ago became the meaningless emblem of poetic genius. When the poet Amanda Gorman appeared at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, both detractors and admirers wanted to set her against the highest possible comparison. They didn’t reach for the US’s new Nobel laureate, Louise Glück. They went for Keats: either ‘Amanda Gorman is Keats-level brilliant’ or ‘Well, it’s not exactly Keats’. But what is Keats, exactly?

It seems to me that there is a difference between the 5ft English poet who worked for a very few years before dying at 25 in 1821, and the idea of ‘Keats’. The idea of ‘Keats’ encompasses a great love story with Fanny Brawne; some beautiful, dreamy phrases; and a couple of impressive philosophical statements which, as it happens, fit very well into a tweet. There is ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’, and the other — ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’ If that were all, I don’t think Keats would claim our attention, since both those apothegms are demonstrably false. Things the 1800s thought possessed beauty have long stopped giving anyone joy, and there are plenty of essential truths, such as the detail of natural selection or the Thirty Years War, where beauty is entirely dispensable.

Lucasta Miller’s task, which she carries out very successfully, is to strip away what we think when we think about Keats. She presents him to us as he would have struck his first readers. There is such a glutinous layer over Keats, the product of decades of entranced readers. In P.G. Wodehouse’s Mike (1909) the cricket captain Wyatt offers a glass of water, saying:

Oh, for a beaker full of the warm south, full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene! Have you ever tasted Hippocrene, young Jackson? Rather like ginger-beer, with a dash of raspberry-vinegar. Very heady.