 This evening we're delighted to have La Casta Miller with us. La Casta is a critic who has been published in all the main British newspapers and magazines, but she's also a biographer and has written several books, particularly on 19th century literary figures. The latest of which is this here. Keats, a brief life in nine poems and one epitaph. And it's a book I highly recommend to anybody who wants to follow up after tonight's talk. It's an innovative biography, as well as being brief. It takes a different angle on biography and she anchors the book on nine of our most favourite poems and obviously nine of the finest poems ever written in the English language. So that's La Casta's book. In fact, it's worth just noting that when La Casta's book, which was published just two years ago just now, was reviewed by the New York Times, the critic there referred to Keats in saying, and I quote here, for a certain quality of lyrical writing, Keats is unsurpassed since Shakespeare. So tonight, myself, and I'm sure all of you welcome La Casta Miller to teach us a bit about how a tough little cockney managed to achieve such wonderful outcomes. La Casta. Thank you. Thank you so much, Campbell, for that incredibly generous introduction and thank you very much for inviting me. Just before I start, I just want to say if somebody can't hear me, can you let me let me know as soon as possible and then we can try and do something to sort out the bike. But apparently I'm getting a thumbs up from the back so it seems it seems to be working. Yes, you know, it's such an honor to be invited to speak to you today. I mean, I've seen some of the incredibly distinguished speakers that you've had before and it makes me feel incredibly privileged to be here. You know, it's a real pleasure for me to come to Glasgow, which I have to confess is is my first time to Glasgow not my first time to Scotland. And as I was sort of setting off on my journey, I was thinking about how in London I actually live very close to where Keats lived in Hampstead. As in fact does Alistair Campbell who I understand was one of your speakers the other day. And so I felt I was sort of almost following in his footsteps because he made a journey up to Scotland in the summer of 1818 when he was 22 on a walking tour with his friend Charles Brown, and they actually went on foot, all the way up to the Highlands where he lived from Liverpool. So it was a it was a it really was a hiking holiday. Unlike me I obviously blew in an hour and a half which was not not quite as picturesque. And so of course, as soon as I knew that I was coming here to Glasgow, I thought, gosh, well I'm going to look up in Keats's letters and see, you know, did he go to Glasgow, what did he make a Glasgow and he did briefly come to and I found his account of coming into the city I think it was on July the 13th, 1818, but unfortunately it wasn't a completely sort of propitious description. He describes how he he he comes over the bridge obviously with his friend Charles Brown that he's not really mentioning Brown at the moment, and he thinks that people are staring at him and you have to I don't think he's this tough little cocky in some senses. But here he really is a bit of a nervous traveler out of his comfort zone, because as soon as he arrives a man comes up to him, and this man who who Keats takes to be, he thinks this man must be drunk, and, and Keats immediately puts his arm up sort of in self defense, and the man just looks at him and says, I've seen a lot of foreigners but I've never seen the likes of you. That's the point at which point Keats threatens to call the police. I, as a biographer, I think well what do I make of this little anecdote, I think one of the things that really tells us is, you know, how far Keats had traveled he's not very well traveled a little bit in the south of England. And he's really, you know, a lot of people don't quite realize what a, what a Londoner he is that he spent his childhood, absolutely in the center of the city of London, born in Moorgate is a very sort of urban childhood. So although we think of him often as a nature poet, and of course he did write some absolutely, you know, amazing poems about nature I mean some of the best in the English language like the autumn. He's not really a child of nature in that sense he is a child of the city. So as Campbell said I've the talk I'm giving today is going to be based on my book. Keats a brief life of nine crimes and one epitaph. Keats's life was brief, tragically brief he was only 25 when he died of tuberculosis in Rome where he's gone in the vain hope of alleviating his symptoms. And as Campbell's already pointed out you'll be quite relieved to hear that my book to is is quite short. I set myself this challenge really of trying to get the sort of teaming complexity of both keeps the man and keeps the poet into quite a compact narrative form. I mean that's something maybe you know if anyone has any questions afterwards I'm fascinated by the form of biography and particularly the form of literary biography and all the decisions we have to make as biographers as to how we're going to tell this story. I think Campbell's probably explained a bit how the book works I've chosen nine of Keats's greatest most famous poems, and each one is printed at the beginning of chapter so that I give the reader up close the experience of the poem first. But then what I do is to go sort of under the surface of that poem to put it in its context to put to put it in the context of the flesh and blood real complicated man who was john Keats. Because I'm very aware that most of us probably have first come across Keats's poetry in standards anthologies, where they are the poems are sort of taken out of their context and to that extent this embodied. And I wanted to write this book for somebody who perhaps had only come across Keats in that disembodied form to sort of re embody him, or even perhaps for for someone who, excuse me, who may even only know Keats from the couple of quotations from his works that really sort of become totally deracinated from their context and become part of the language like a thing of beauty is a joy forever, which I seem to remember is quoted even by Mary Poppins that she said takes a potplot out of her capacious carpet bag. I don't know about you, but I find it almost ironic that that's become Keats's most famous line, because to my mind it's probably the least Keatsian line Keats ever wrote, because it is so abstract the language is so abstract a thing it's very sort of indeterminate. A thing is, you know, it's just, there's no sort of concrete reality behind it. And I think much more typically Keatsian is something like, well I will read you in a minute. There's a stanza from O to a Nightingale, which really exemplifies what is, you know, I think the absolute sort of DNA of Keats's style, which is what his friend and mentor Lee Hunt called his poetical concentrations, the way in which he takes these incredibly concrete quite physical images and he piles them one on the other. Each image retains its sort of independent existence, concrete existence, and yet at the same time bleeds in this sort of metamorphic way into the next. So I mean this is a famous, famous bit from O to a Nightingale. O for a draft of vintage that have been cooled a long age in the deep delvid earth, tasting of flora and the country green dance and Provencal song and sunburned mouth. O for a beaker full of the warm south, full of the crew, the blushful hypocrite with beaded bubbles winking at the brim and purple stained mouth. Now, I mean, if you think about that it starts I mean it's it's about a glass of wine isn't it, a draft of vintage. Okay. And that's been cooled along age in the deep delvid earth yes we're still sort of that still sort of makes that it were logical sense tasting of flora. Okay, you can imagine wine having a sort of, I mean they talk about having a sort of floral bouquet, but this is flora with a capital M this is flora, a goddess, a woman so this is this is wine that tastes of a woman and it tastes of the country green. And then it tastes of a dance it tastes of a body in motion, and then it tastes of a sound it tastes like Provencal song. And then we get this typical Keatsie and sort of oxymoron sunburned mouth you often get these, these images where he sort of compacts together, the negative with the positive pleasure with pain. So you have mirth you have happiness, and then you have sunburned this is about skin this is about sort of scorching painful skin. And I won't go on and on through the whole stanza but just to point out how you know we are imagining this glass of wine well I will go on because it is such a wonderful piece of writing. This is the true the blushful hippocrine. Well the hippocrine was in ancient mythology a fountain sacred to the muses as it's, it's a fountain of water but this is blushful because of course it's, it's red because this is red wine but of course blushful. We blush it's it's human skin, and then it's got these beaded bubbles winking at the brim so these bubbles they've become eyes. And purple staining mice. Now is that because it's the mouth of the goblet or is it the mouth of the person who's drinking from the goblet. And then you get an even further layer of imagery and and sort of metaphorical sort of illusion in purple staining which is an illusion to the myth of Priscilla Mel, who was in ancient mythology, raped by Tereus, and he ripped out her tongue so that she couldn't tell anyone about it. Is the microphone doing okay. And, but, but the gods took pity on her and turned her into a nightingale. So of course this is the reference to the fact that this is to a nightingale. But as you can see that purple staining mouth. It's the exuberant pleasure of drinking red wine but it's also got a much much darker and tragic element to it. The title for today was body and soul John Keats body and soul. And there's a lot of sort of a lot of soul a lot of soulfulness in the in the sort of popular cliche of Keats. But there isn't quite so much body and I want to sort of put a bit of the emphasis on the body because you know we tend to think of Keats as this rather ethereal creature, rather sort of etiolated rather languid. And of course Keats, you know he does die tragically young, but we've got to think of the Keats before he gets permanently ill. Who is, you know, a creature full of energy and drive. I mean he's absolutely not the cliche of the sensitive poet, as you'd comically get for example in Charles Searle's cliche of the schoolboy, the schoolboy poet for the Rington Thomas who skipped around saying sort of, oh the flowers are the birds. And he's the school weed. Now Keats was anything but the school weed. When he was at school, he was famous for fisticuffs. And one of his classmates, you know, remembered him very well said that boy keeps, he was incredibly charismatic boy. I always knew he'd do something really special. But I thought it would be in the military, which is a really sort of different angle on on this idea of the poetic keeps. Which is not to say that Keats isn't a sensitive person he is he was an incredibly sensitive person but it's this sort of, this this sort of be brawl energy about him, this sort of which can sort of sometimes shade into this hypersensitivity, which is I think what you get when he's feeling a bit nervous at entering a strange city and a man comes up to him and he goes like this. In fact, only a couple of weeks before he describes that scene. He's talking to a friend about how sometimes he, he go, he experiences these, these periods of sort of paranoia where he feels that you know, he's suspicious of everyone. And keeps did actually have quite a traumatic childhood. His father died in an accident when keeps was eight. His mother then runs off. She then comes back into his life when he's only 14, and then she dies. And he himself attributes this sort of nervous temperament to the early traumas that he suffered in childhood. If we're going to think about where this ethereal etiolated figure of keeps came from. I think the one person we've got to blame is Shelly who wrote a very famous elegy keeps shortly after keeps died called add a nice. And in this poem he presents keeps as a, as a, as a broken lily, a pale flower, a gentle child, and almost as a sort of spiritualized essence at the end keeps is sort of transubstantiated almost as sort of neoplasmic essence. And he talks about how keeps is going to sort of join this band of great dead poets. Robed in dazzling, what does he call it. Robbed in dazzling immortality again as this very, very abstracted spiritualized view of keeps now keeps himself would have loved the idea of joining a band of great poets he really, really identified with the poets that he admired. He's always aware that their immortal works came out of minds that were housed in mortal bodies. He's always aware of their sort of physicality when he sees a lock of Milton's hair. He has a physical reaction he says I feel my forehead hot and flushed the emotional response he has the sense of intimacy with something cut off from the body of Milton. And also when he when he visited burns his cottage and I know you had a lecture on burns I think it was only last week. He writes a sonnet while he's in the cottage, and he's really sort of aware of the fact that that his own body is now filling the space the physical space that burns his body had once filled. He says this mortal body of 1000 days now fills burns a space in my own room. And he's also by this stage burns his cottage is doubling up as a sort of whiskey shop. And so keeps is also drinking some of the whiskey, and he goes on to say again it's very physical but he's describing my pulse is warm with dino and barley my head is light with pledging a great soul, but it's almost as if he feels he's while he's physically drinking in the whiskey he's sort of at the same time drinking in burns is genius. And that's almost like there's no distinction between the physical and the spiritual there. There's certainly nothing in Shelly's portrayal of this spiritualized keys that that gives you any idea of the way in which keeps writes about physical experience this is a man who once said oh for a life of sensations rather than thoughts. I mean this is the way he writes about eating a neck terrain for example. Good God have fine. It went down soft, pulpy slushy, oozy. All it's delicious on born one melted down my throat, like a large beatified strawberry. So if that side of Keats doesn't get into into into Shelly's portrayal of him, you know, neither does the Keats, who is quite capable of in a letter to another letter to a friend, writing a really bawdy verse about having sex in a field with a girl called Randipole Betty. Now I didn't really I mean this word Randipole rather sort of confused me. So I looked it up in a dictionary of the vulgar tongue from Keats is era at a Randipole was a rather sort of delinquent good time girl. The word Randipole had a you know a much ruder meaning it meant with a woman on top so in fact this these verses actually have a sort of comic point to them, because the whole point is that she's lying flat on her back dead like a Venus tipsy. So this body side of Keats is something that I think I've certainly find that there are some people who find it really sort of difficult to swallow. But I think that you know there's a great exuberance about it at the same time. I've talked about how much he appreciated the whiskey in Scotland and the whiskey that he had in Burns's Cottage, but the drink that he really liked was Claret, and it's, it's a very famous passage. And you may know it already, but I'm going to read you Keats, Keats is paying to Claret that comes in in one of his letters, because it is such a wonderful piece of writing. And what it reminds me of is the, is the sort of the comic prose low life scenes in a Shakespeare comedy. Now I like Claret, whenever I, whenever I can have Claret I must drink it. It's the only palette affair that I'm at all sensual in. It fills the mouth, one's mouth with a gushing freshness. Then it goes down cool and femurless. And then you do not feel it quarreling with your liver. No, it's rather a peacemaker and lies as quiet as it did in the grape. It is as fragrant as the Queen Bee, and the more ethereal part of it mounts into the brain, not assaulting the cerebral apartments, like a bully in a bad house looking to his troll and hurrying from door to door bouncing against his waist cut, but rather walks like a lad in about his own enchanted palace, so gently that you do not feel his step. Other wines of a heavy and spiritist nature transform a man into a silliness. This makes him a hermese. Now that's a count of drinking Claret, just written in a letter for a friend and I have to encourage you all and I'm sure some of you have read Keats' letters or extracts from Keats' letters, but please, please go and read as many of them as you can because I mean I do not know of any letters in which a dead poet is so alive as in Keats' letters. I mean Byron's letters are magnificent but one always thinks that Byron has, you know, a little bit of an eye on posterity when he wrote them, whereas Keats, it really is just pouring out of him stream of consciousness like communicating with his friends. And yes, as I said, that's description of Claret. He writes it not that long before he writes O to a Nightingale with that section about O for a draft of vintage that I read at the beginning of the talk, and almost you can see him sort of rehearsing the poem in the letter. When I read that to you and went through the way in which he mixes all these images together, part of what I sort of wanted to do is in a sense to try and make Keats strange again because he's so famous that we sort of always think we know what his poetry is like, and it's sort of almost become normalized to us, but the time he published writing like that was utterly experimental and original. I mean, you know, and many even, you know, many of his readers, I mean, even sympathetic critics would say things like we just can't sort of understand what he's what he's talking about. I mean, why does he have to be so original, and Byron was particularly sniffy about that, but that passage from O to a Nightingale he said, oh, I can't imagine I mean what could he possibly mean a beaker full of the world south I mean it doesn't make any sense. And I'm going to be talking a little bit in a minute about Keats's reputation and his lifetime because although of course he's now recognized as one of the greatest poets ever to work in the English language. That was not the case in his lifetime. And of course, the epitaph that he very poignantly wrote his own gravestone was here lies one whose name was written water, as if he thought he was going to disappear. He always felt like that because it's a slightly earlier stage, in fact, when he just been on the receiving end from some pretty negative criticism. I mean his poetry was called things like grumbling idiocy I mean these critics in those days they really didn't pull their punches. Um, you know, he just quietly says in a letter to his brother, I think I should be among the English poets after my death. And this, you know, he's not being particularly boastful it doesn't feel like a boast. And, you know, he was right I think he sort of knew that he was doing something really quite new and strange with with English poetic language. I was asked to do something quite interesting the other day I was asked to take part in a debate between the three great second generation romantics, Byron Keats and Shelly. And of course it was a bit of an artificial thing but it was quite fun and I of course was representing Keats. And there were, you know, two other writers being Shelly and Byron and so, of course you know Shelly's this great intellectual he's probably the cleverest he's this great political radical. He's definitely the most radical of them. Byron is the wittiest and he you know he, you know he, he creates practically single handed the whole sort of idea of the celebrity culture. And Keats, and Keats is the one I was rooting for, I mean at the time, he is very much the underdog, very much the outsider, very much the outlier. I mean, for a start he doesn't have a conventional classical education. I mean, unlike, you know, Shelly who goes to eat in an Oxford, although he gets expelled in letter, and Byron who who goes to Harrow and Cambridge. So they have these very sort of standard elite classical educations and of course they come from an elite section of society. I mean, obviously Lord Byron is an aristocrat, and, and Shelly was the son of a Baronette. Now, he didn't go to a posh public school, and he didn't go to university. He didn't go to school when he was only 14. There's a little bit more complicated than that. Because, in fact, part of the problem that someone keeps his contemporaries had with him, and his, his hostile critics would, you know, would call him sort of vulgar, undereducated. They thought he, you know, that he was sort of lower class, but, but, you know, he wasn't sort of, he actually came from a rather sort of ambiguous, up and coming, sort of, I suppose lower middle class, very metropolitan society. You know, in those days the cultural sort of the cultural cliches the cultural prejudices were that you could be slotted into being an aristocratic poet like Byron, or you could have the label of a so called peasant poets like Burns or John Claire. But he didn't fit any of these things. I mean, his father does in fact come from quite a humble background. He works as an Osler or stable hand in a very prosperous limery stable in London, which, which was run by, in fact, the man who whose daughter, this humble Osler, marry so he marries the boss's daughter, and eventually takes over the business when his, his father-in-law retires. And as I said, it's a very prosperous business, a limery stable, hiring out horses, stabling horses, I mean, you know, horses are basically the only form of transport so you know it's in big demand. And Keats wasn't exactly poor. Although he, you know, both his parents are dead by the time he's 14, but you know he has enough of an inheritance that during the period where he's writing poetry, you know, he's able to not have to earn his living, he's got a trust fund. As Campbell mentioned in his introduction, one of the really crucial things about Keats' education is that at the age of 14, he goes off to be a apprentice to an apothecary, which is the first step in training to be a doctor. Now, in those days, everybody you trained to be a doctor did it that way. It's like if you wanted to go into the Navy, you had to go in as a midshipman at 12, you learned on the job. It used to be thought that Keats was this sort of poetic dreamer who didn't really attend to his medical studies. He was just thinking about poetry, but more recent scholarly research has shown that he was actually a really very committed and really very successful medical student. He went on to Guy's Hospital, where he was promoted to the role of dresser, which basically meant an assistant surgeon, and indeed he would be, you know, he'd be assisting at operations. I mean, which were really, really grisly in the days particularly before anesthesia. And he'd even been banning the equivalent of A&E one week in four at the hospital. And on one occasion he saved the life of a woman who'd been shot in the neck by her jealous husband in the Prince Regent pub. He successfully removed the pistol ball and saved this lady's life. For me, I, as you can tell, I've been, well, yes, you probably spotted that I'm talking to you tonight in quite a sort of discursive way rather than laying out as a thesis in a very formal way. But if you put me on the spot and said that I had to come up with a thesis as to why John Keats was able to create this extremely unique and original voice at the time he did. I think I'd point to three things. One, I'd point to his rather sort of outsider marginal position in society where he doesn't quite belong within the class structures. He's, it's rather amorphous. So I think that sort of gives him, it makes it likely this is going to be less conventional. And this is really important, the medical training. This gives him this very sort of intimate sense of physicality that you get in his poetry. I feel that, you know, when Keats uses a metaphor like a naked brain, which he does in his poem in Dimion, we know we can know for sure that he has actually seen a naked brain in the anatomy room. The physicality of his poetry was something that really discombobulated his contemporaries. I mean, you know, they use words like gross. I mean, when he, when he talks about a woman's lips as being slippery blisses. I mean, you know, there's, there's saliva there there's a body fluid, and they go sort of yuck. So he's got the medical background, and which I think feeds into this, this sensory nature of his language, because it has given him this very intimate intimate relationship with a human body. And then we've got his education slightly earlier on at school. As I said, he didn't go to a posh public school, but he did go to a very brilliant school where he probably got a better education at that stage, than Byron or Shelley. It was a former dissenting Academy. And he was much mocked by his critics later on for not having learned ancient Greek. But the reason why he hadn't learned ancient Greek was because the curriculum was so broad at this school that there wasn't really space for it because he was learning astronomy and French and history and all sorts of other things. And he was learning an awful lot of Latin. He did become a very accomplished Latin scholar. I was talking a bit about the critical attacks that he had to withstand during his career. And a lot of them, particularly in Blackwood's magazine, Blackwood's Edinburgh magazine in a review unsigned but written by JJ Lockhart. It mocks Keats for being vulgar and undereducated and that he only knows Homer from Chapman and that Chapman was a translation of Homer, that in fact inspired the very very first great poem that Keats wrote it was certainly the first poem that got him noticed it kickstarted his career, his sort of breakthrough poem as it were. And because it's so important it was so important to me in my book, as it were to put the poetry up front because of course you know the poetry is why we're here at all the poetry is really why we're interested in Keats at all. I thought I'd read a couple of poems tonight and the first one I'm going to read is on first looking into Chapman's Homer. I've been told in the realms of gold. And many goodly states and kingdoms seen around many western islands have I been which bards in fealty to Apollo hold off of one wide expanse had I been told that deep proud Homer ruled as his demean. I breathe it's pure serene till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold, then felt I like some watcher of the skies, but a new planet swims into his Ken, or like stout quarters when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific. And all his men looked at each other with a wild semise, silent upon a peak in Darien. Now that's one of Keats is most frequently anthologized poems. I think it I think it's one of the earliest supposed to be anthologized I think it's actually in the bull graves golden treasury first one baby 61. I mentioned at the beginning, something about how often when we we read poems and anthology they're sort of somehow sort of disembodied decontextualized deracinated. And you know I mean how many people who've read that poem. I don't know what Chapman's Homer was, who Chapman was extended doesn't matter at all because I think that's a poem about, you know, a creative response to reading. But on the other hand, it sort of makes our own response so much richer when we do know a bit about its context, and we do know a bit about Chapman. I said earlier that that keeps had been to this really rather extraordinary school clocks Academy in Enfield, and one of the things that he did that he made very good friends with the headmaster son it was about eight years older than him. And with this chap Charles Cardin Clark keeps would study English poetry. He'd study it in great detail he'd study. You know all the different forms like the sonnet and the epic he'd study the great poets but not necessarily the poets of his own era or of the later 18th century he studied poets from an earlier era from the Shakespearean era. So Spencer, Shakespeare, Milton, and indeed George Chapman, who was a contemporary of Shakespeare. I think with that poem it's it's what it's one of these examples where we are so lucky and I felt so lucky as a biographer that we can sometimes know the precise circumstances in which keeps wrote a poem sort of, you know when it was written where it was written, why it was written, who it's first reader was, there is actually a lovely bit in one of Keith's letters, where he describes himself. He's writing his brother who's in America, and keeps gives us a very, very vivid account of keeps his own bodily position as he's, you know, I'm sitting here with my back to the, the fire with one foot rather a skew from the rug. So he thinks if only I could have known what position Shakespeare was sitting in when he wrote to be or not to be. Obviously, we can never know that about Shakespeare that just isn't the biographical material. But what we are so lucky about with these great 19th century writers who write these voluminous letters is that we can often know precisely those things. Sometimes sorry to go off on a bit of a tangent, but it worries me the era of the email and the text. It worries me how future literary biographers are going to, are going to deal with their no subjects writings I mean, you know, to what extent they don't have the skills, you know, even survive and they just don't have that sort of, you know, especially when you actually get to see a manuscript in real life, and you really feel incredibly close to the person who wrote it. But sorry, I've gone off on a tangent I want to bring us back to Chapman's Homer, which was written in October 1816. At this time he's working all hours as a junior doctor, and what he and his friend Charles Cloud and Clark want to do what keeps want to do on his evening off is to go round to his friend Charles's house, and to read this, what by then was, you know, a book that's like over 100 years old, more than over 100 years old, I mean, you know, you know, nearly 200 years old. And you know so what are these two young men you know why you know they have supper they have a drink, and then they're reading this book, why is it so exciting to them. And I think they weren't dusty old academics, I think it's we've got to get ourselves back into a mindset where there was something very radical at that stage about being interested in Chapman's translation of Homer in particular, and indeed of those writers of an earlier time. Because at that time, the sort of gold standard in Homer translation was the one written by Alexander Pope, the great 18th century Augustine, which is all written in these very measured, polite, rational, poetic couplets. It's not that keeps doesn't know anything about Homer because he has already read Pope's translation and the excitement he feels on reading Chapman is that he feels that there is something so alive in Chapman's language that Pope missed. I'm really lucky because Charles Caden clock his friend in fact wrote a memoir in which he recalled that evening and he recalled very precisely the passage in Homer that they were reading and why it excited keeps so much. The passage in the Odyssey where Odysseus is being he sort of is washed up onto a beach half drowned at Pope describes this in these rather sort of prissy terms he says from mouth and nose the briny torrents ran and lost in lassitude lay all the man. Now eats and Clark they find this completely risible and it is a little bit I mean you know the way. I mean you know pope was a most brilliant technician of the heroic carpet and somehow they managed to have hit on his probably his two worst lines, although I have to say a friend of mine who's a professor of 18th century literature did actually recently tell the Pope did not in fact write every single line of his best selling Homer translation some of it was done by assistance and maybe this bit was. But anyway so we get this very sort of precisely itemized nose and mouth and then that weird abstract circumlocution lost in lassitude lay all the man. Anyway, George Chapman renders that whole that all that all that in this one phrase, the sea had soaked his heart through. And you can see that how sort of brilliantly concise that is how it yolks the physical and the emotional in one. So you can just feel him simultaneously been soaked to the skin and touch to the heart and keeps and and Clark, they love this they think that the poetry of that earlier era of Shakespeare of Milton of Chapman of Spencer, they think this is more authentic. Than the Pope, for example, they think that it's an interesting Lee, their love of English poetry also has a political dimension, a political dimension on sort of what we now call the left, they feel that there's a sense in particular with the Milton that they're sort of going back to old English liberties, and in a sense what they want to do is to free the English language from its chains they want, and that's in a sense what I feel that keeps is doing when he's channeling this very sort of Shakespearean richness of of metaphor and concrete imagery. As I was saying earlier. It's was on the receiving end of some really very very negative to operation. And this I should be pointing out was actually sort of really part of the culture wars of the time. There's a lot of political motivation behind it, because Keats is mental Lee haunt who was the editor of the examiner, which promoted Keats where this poem Chapman's Homer was first showcased had been, you know, they were, I mean Lee haunt was a radical who'd been in prison for the library, libeling the Prince Regent, and the right wing blackboards magazine are absolutely sort of have the knives out for Lee haunt and his so called cockney school of poets, among whom Keats is a leading figure, and the one who is, who is most mocked. You know, as I said, you know, comments like grumbling idiocy and it's not just that they also find his poetry they find it smutty they find it vulgar. And they link all these insults at it. Now, they're totally wrong to think that Keats's poetry was bad. It isn't bad. It's, it's, you know, as Campbell quoted that wonderful quote from the former American. Laureate Robert Pinsky, which, in fact, I think I was going to quote as well that, you know, that for a certain lyrical essence of poetry written in English, Keats and his greatest poems of past is every writer since Shakespeare. And I think we've got to, we've got to listen to the early critics a tiny bit. Just because I think that, you know, I think it's important to realize how unsettling Keats's poetry was that it sort of hits a nerve, and that, you know, as I said earlier we're so familiar with it. I think that, you know, we, you know, it's good to make it strange again because Keats is, you know, Keats is very much associated with the idea of the beautiful but I think that that can be, you know, it's not an easy idea of beautiful. There's a lot of sort of abrasion and conflict in in Keats's use of conflicting imagery. I, and I, and I, you know, I like to feel that Keats still can unsettle us. You know, that, you know, pleasure is always sort of, you know, cheap by jail with, with pain that there are, you know, even in O2 Autumn there are wailing gnats there are flies in O2 a nightingale. And I, you know, I think that I don't know how much longer than I got about 10, 15 minutes. 10, 10 fantastic. The, the most famous concepts that Keats came up with in his letters, which I'm sure you'll all have heard of negative capability, which he described as being the, the ability to be in a state of doubt or mystery without any irreversible reaching reason. For me, one of the, one of the great things that Keats teaches us and one of the great things he does in his poetry is that he really makes the most of what a literary text can do what literary creativity can do that say a nonfiction a literary text can't do that a work of philosophy or, or something can't do in a literary text to things can simultaneously as it were be true at the same time. They can be sort of held in suspension at the same time and I think that that's, I think Keats does that, that brilliantly. But Shelly's add a nice that I, I talked about earlier that to is an intervention in these culture wars, because of Keats, of course, Keats sorry Shelly to is. Well, I mean, Keats is Keats is definitely a liberal he's on you know he's on the radical. He's on he's on as I said what we call the left. He's not quite as way out as Shelly who's this sort of. But Shelly has this incredible sense of entitlement he's this sort of upper class anarchist who feels that he can be as radical as he likes partly because you know, he's, you know, he's, he's, he's living off his future inheritance and and he's got this internal sense of unshakable self confidence. But yeah so that so the, the this political cultural that keeps gets bound up in by the time he dies, Shelly has every sort of reason to want to turn Keats into this sort of spiritualized master he wants a romantic master, a liberal romantic master. And one of the reasons I think why he, as I said sort of. I use that we use I'm repeating myself but I use that word spiritualized turns him into this sort of abstract essence is that one of the things about Keats that really sort of disturbed people at the time. And worried them was the incredibly sort of physical and sensual way in which he talks, not just about the human body but about physical desire. You know, that is why you know a lot of his, his critics thought he was smutty. But Keats does not talk doesn't write about sex in a sort of anatomically crude way. I mean it's all done with through metaphor, but there's I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that his contemporaries. He was more under that under the metaphor, and knew, and knew what he was writing about I mean you know they say things like rather puritanical critic says, we will assure him, however, that not all the flimsy veil of words in which he would involve immoral images kind of tone for their impurity. I found it quite interesting since I since publishing this book that I found myself, almost caught in, as it were some more culture wars in our in our own era, and that when I've discussed for example keeps his poem the eve of St Agnes. I'm sure a lot of you know it it's one of his, one of his most brilliant, a lovely sensual narrative poem, set in the Middle Ages, based on the legend that on St Agnes Eve, if a virgin sort of performs the right rituals and goes to bed when she's asleep she'll dream of her future lover or husband. And so in the poem Madeline does all this, and she goes to sleep goes to bed goes to sleep. What she doesn't know is that a real flesh and bloods would be lover has crept into the castle crept into her bedroom, watched her undress. And as she still asleep creeps into bed with her, and basically in very sort of lushly metaphorical language. But there is a sort of there is a, you know, a passionate consummation of the law of his love for her. And it's very worrying in our days of me to that she still sleep at the time and she hasn't really been able to give her consent, but the very fact that that I sort of pointed this out and it's not it's not a particularly original reading that it's in the poem that do portray poor Pharoah, the lover sorry I've called him Lorenzo before that's in another poem, poor Pharoah. You know, I mean, you know he's this, you know, you know she he's sort of described almost as being a bit like a hunter she's like a, like, like a bird and she's like, she's, she's described as being like the poisonous nightingale which is an allusion to that same myth of Philamel who of course is raped. Now, when I suggested that that you know there was some act of sexual consummation happening in this poem is heroin. By the way she goes to bed a virgin but her name is Madeline which is like Mary Magdalene and a Magdalene was another word for a fallen woman and indeed keeps a guy's hospital it was next door to the Magdalene hospital which was a rescue home for for fallen women and prostitutes. So, you know, when I suggested that maybe there was some sex going on in this time, I was, I was attacked as somebody actually called me a disgustingly paranoid breed of Femocrit. And this really, it really showed me how this has had really struck an even today. And another critic suggested well, you know, what was very, very complimentary about my book. But on the other hand said oh but she gets it wrong they certainly don't have sex indeed. I'm going to explain this now. It wasn't me who said that they had sex it was actually keeps his own publisher, who in, you know, he gets the drafts the poem he says come on keeps. We can't publish this. It's, it's far too. It's, it's far too explicit it's far too. You know, it'll completely alienate women readers, and the publisher himself was quite clear what was going on he says porforo presses breast upon breast and acts all the acts of a bone and five day husband, while she merely thinks she's playing the part of a while in a dream. Clearly this issue of, you know, clearly he thinks they're, you know, he's performing all the acts of a bona fide husband, and there's a slightly worrying thing going on about the fact that she thinks it's only happening in a dream. I mean clearly it's not just a sort of modern me to anxiety keeps his publisher even had a bit of that too. He keeps his response is quite interesting it's quite it's quite it's quite funny in a way I mean he gets really up in arms, and he puts on this sort of macho posture and says, Ah, you know, only a unit could have left a made a maid in such a situation. Now, I don't read this as he keeps himself being a sexual predator from it this to me is an index of his of his insecurity and in fact the theme for this poem was suggested. By a woman we all know about Fanny Braun, and I'm not going to have time really to talk much about his relationship with her but before he fell in love with Fanny Braun, he had another relationship with a rather mysterious woman called Mrs Isabella Jones. And who's a very sort of sophisticated and flirtatious woman and it was she who suggested, rather, you know, as a little way, I think probably slightly, almost with a slight sense of satire that he should, he should take on this, this subject of the eaves and the thing that the irony is that when Keith hasn't encountered with Mrs Jones, he's previously on a previous occasion as he tells us, warmed with her and kissed her. On this occasion, she sort of does that and he's actually feeling very, very insecure. So I was, I'm afraid I have rabid is on rather a lot. I want to wind up by saying that I was, in fact, I was going to, well, shall I just read you another time. Have we got time for another time. I'm going to read you one more poem just quickly keeps his complicated attitude to women and maybe we'll have some questions about it afterwards. Go back to his mother who abandoned him when he was little. I think Keats is complicated as she towards women comes out and what I think is possibly my favorite poem by Keats it's a very well known one and it's a short one. Label down some mercy. Sorry, I'm definitely going to need my glasses for this one. Oh what canal the night at arms alone. The sedges wither from the neck. And no birds sing. Oh what canal the night at arms so haggard. So woe begone squirrels granaries full and the harvest star. I see a lily on my brow with anguish moist. And on my cheeks, a fading rose vast wither of two. I met a lady in the meets all beautiful. A fairies child her hair was long, her foot was light and her eyes were wild. I made a garland by her head and bracelets to and fragrant zone. She looked at me as she did love and made sweet bone. I set her on my pacing steed and nothing else or all day long. Beside long she would bend and sing a fairies song. He found me roots of relish sweet and honey wiles and man adieu and sure and sure. In language strange she said. I love the true. She took me to Elgin grot. And there she wept. And sighed full soul. And there I shot her wild wild eyes. With kisses for and there she lulled me to sleep and there I dreamed. Woe betide. The latest dream. I ever dreamt. On cold hillside. I saw pale kings and princes to pale warriors death pale where they all they cried. La belle dame so merci the hath in thrall. I saw the star lips in the glow. With horrid warning gaped wide. And I awoke. And found me here. On the cold hillside. I was born and born and born and born and born and born and born and born and born and born and born and born and born and born and born again. Now a virgin here and now. And pale he loiterin. The sage is with the Lake. And no birds. Thank you very much. Thanks very much to Kasta. We're just going to take a break for just a few minutes and then we'll probably get set up the Q&A. who is the superb and noted tenor Ian Bosch, which was just about to take the stage in London at the same moment she was about to speak here. So it's not often that happens. So a few minutes break and Q&A. Okay, could we start to invite some questions, please? Right away. The lady in the blue here. Thank you very much for the talk. Very interesting. Thank you. I was wondered whether Kate had issues with alcohol and drug misuse. I mean, he liked his claret. But you think of the line of emptying some dull opiate. Yes. Yes. You think, oh, he seems to know about that. And if so, Bearding, do you think it might have on this imagery and poetry? That's a very interesting question. I mean, he certainly, I think he worries that he times that he is drinking too much. At one point he, he says, oh, I've never had more than three glasses at a time now. And his mother was in fact an alcoholic. She was addicted to brandy. I mean, the rather tragic story of his mother was that after his father is killed in an accident, she runs off with another man. Keats and his siblings never live with her again. They go to their grandparents. Then her relationship with the other man breaks up. Then she's living in sin with yet another man. And by the time she crawls back to her own mothers, she's addicted to brandy and also dying of TB. So, yes, in terms of the opiates, I mean, some people have said, was he actually taking Lordenham as he was writing Ode to a Nightingale? I find it, I think that's unlikely. I mean, I think you would need a level of you know, intense concentration. But then again, I mean, it's he does write that poem with astonishing quickness and facility. And, you know, it has occurred to me, I mean, you know, the sort of parallel with the sort of jazz improvisers who, you know, many of them very famously took a lot of heroin. And, you know, that, that sort of sense of, you know, you're sort of not being impeded by too much conscious thought, allowing it to just come out. And, you know, I mean, the manuscript of Ode to a Nightingale, which is quite clearly the first draft that's in the Fitzwilliam Museum, because he's as a false start on one side. I mean, he's clearly written it in one false swoop. But whether or not he needed any chemical enhancement, I don't know. I mean, but I think he was possibly, I think, I think he was possibly worried about. I think, I think these physical appetites were things that he sounds very zuberant about at times. I also think they're things that cause him, cause him anxiety, as with, with, with physical passion and his feelings about women. Thank you. Graham, behind you there, another question. Thank you. Thank you very much for an enjoyable talk. I always had great problems at school with interpretation, but I'm thinking perhaps I never understood English. However, my question is, in your lecture, I felt you've spent an awful lot of the time talking about the attitude of others towards Keats and his work, rather than Keats's view of his life and his work. Am I correct? Or do, as a biographer or someone's regret for 200 years, is it difficult to know what he was thinking when he wrote? Well, as if she said, I hadn't really sort of, I hadn't really thought that that was particularly what I was, what I was doing. I'm not quite sure what to say to that. No, I mean, I, you know, all I can say is read my book because it will tell you what, it will tell you what Keats was doing and what Keats was thinking. But I think it's because I started off by talking about the way that, about the sort of, in a sense, the myth of Keats. And that was the, you know, but I'm just awfully sorry, I can't give you a better answer, except please read my book. Hi there, thanks for fascinating talk. Do you see the influence of Keats in any modern day poets? If so, who are they? And if not, why not? In any modern day poets? You're asking me some very, very difficult questions tonight. Do you, do you? Because I'd like to know. I see that there's certain rebelliousness. You pointed out, I didn't know much about Keats when I came here tonight, but when you talked about. You don't know that much about contemporary poetry, but maybe we ought to get together. You can, if you'd like to be. I was interested in the, the, the mixing of the bodily with the emotion and the intellectual, and I see some poets tearing things down, but I wondered if you saw his influence in helping do that. Sorry. In helping, helping people break up the subject matter and bolt it together in a different way and analyze things differently. I was, I'm thinking of maybe poets like Kate Tempest or Holly McNich. Well, as I said, I'm really, you know, contemporary poetry just aren't sadly, and I've, you know, I feel really ashamed, isn't my thing. And I, you know, I'm really good. Well, I will definitely read Kate Tempest now. Thank you very much for the lecture. I just wanted to ask you perhaps to speculate a little bit, because our, our view of Keats is very much tied up with the tragedy of his early death. So what do you think would have happened to him if he had lived longer? And which, in which direction would his poetry have gone? That's an absolutely wonderful and fascinating question. Would he have carried on writing poetry at all? A lot of his contemporaries, you know, people that we haven't really heard of anymore, like Barry Cornwall, there are a lot of these young men who are writing poetry during this romantic moment where poetry is the thing to do, who then stop and go off and become solicitors or sort of accountants. And it's perfectly possible that Keats might have gone back to medicine. I mean, I only say, I don't, I mean, I say that partly because I'm very aware of what happened to the literary marketplace in the years after Keats died, that the, that the, that the market for poetry became incredibly commercialized. I really don't think that Keats could have made, I mean, especially had he lived, had he married Fanny Braun and had a family, he would not have been able to make a living from his pen in a way that would have satisfied his own sort of poetic needs. My previous book to this one was a book about a poet called Leticia Landon, who was the one of the biggest English poets of this sort of period between the Romantics and the Victorians, between, you know, the death of Byron in 1824, Rise of Dickens sort of end of the 1830s. And hers is a tragic story of a sort of, you know, talent really sort of corrupted by the demands of the marketplace. A poetry was not really in a very good place in the 1820s and 1830s. There is though the possibility that Keats could have turned to a different sort of writing. He would have, I mean, he would have written amazingly for the stage, I think. I mean, he did, he did write an unperformed tragedy, which isn't particularly good, but, but, you know, or, you know, perhaps he could even have written novels. But I don't feel that he would have felt comfortable as an act having to make his living by his pen. And had he married Fanny Braun and had a family, he would have had to have made his living. And yeah, I mean, I don't know, interesting though. I was asking you about Byron and Scott both being able to sell more books in the afternoon than Keats and Shelley in their entire lives. And my question is, how did Keats become popular? Yeah, but it happened during the course of the 19th century, and particularly after Richard Munch and Mills publishes his Life and Letters in 1848. And so by the mid 19th century, Keats is really being talked about in very, very complimentary terms. But it does take a few decades for him to become, well, as I said, you find him in Paul Gray's anthology in 1861. So you can see that by that stage, he's well known enough and appreciated enough. But yes, it happened. But, but, you know, the history of his reputation, even in the course of the 19th century, has its own ups and downs. I mean, when he, when his Letters and Fanny Braun are finally published, the Victorians all, you know, all think it's terrible. They think he's a sort of, you know, emotionally incontinent, sort of whinging, that, you know, the things Swinburne says about him are absolutely awful. So, you know, it goes up and down, but certainly by the end of the 19th century, Keats is enshrined almost as he is now as being one of the great lyric poets in the English language. Was he buried in Westminster Abbey at the time? Sorry? Was he buried in Coates Corner at the time? Keats. He's buried in Rome. He's buried in Rome where he died with this gravestone that does not even have his name on it. All it has is, well, the inscription on it was put there by his friends. And it has Keats' own epitaph, here lies one, his name was written water. But the full epitaph is about how, you know, basically accusing his critics of having handed him to death. So presumably he's got a plaque in Coates Corner. I don't know. I don't know. He's got, but his house is a museum in London, which I really highly recommend anybody to visit. Question, were you at the back there, Adrian? Thank you. And thank you for a wonderful lecture. It seems as a sort of body sensuality in Shakespeare and Johnson, but Keats seems to be making a deliberate attempt to cut through the buttoned upness, if you like, that came after. So he's, in a way, a sort of reactionary by going back in time. Is that fair? So I didn't catch the last bit. So it seems it's not really being a reactionary by going back to a kind of body or past. And in fact, I think Shakespeare's reputation suffered a little bit in the 17th century. It seems a bit too racy. I'm sorry, I didn't quite, I still didn't quite. Can you speak more slowly, please? I'm sorry, it's just so... Were you saying that Keats is not being revolutionary because he's going back in time to the work he's doing there? Yeah, it seems to be this kind of sort of body sensuality that was a bolder thing. Yes, but what the point I was trying to make was that for people at the time, for Keats and Lee Hunt and Charles Caddon Clark and people like that, they didn't think of it as backward-looking. They thought of it as forward-looking. For example, you know, even politically, looking back to Milton the Republican, they think it's absolutely cutting edge, even though it's stuff that's written a long time ago. Thank you. Okay. I don't know if I need to. I've got a question myself. Of course. The question relates to Berners, who we were hearing about two weeks ago, and the fact that Keats made his walking trip and he turned sharp left at Gretna Green and went across to Dumfries and the purpose being to pay homage, really, to Berners at his grave, but he'd preceded the number of years before by coverage, the words were doing exactly the same, not on foot, but on a pony and trap. And they also kind of hero-worship Berns to an extent in a literary fashion, but also possibly Berns the embodiment of ability, talent, genius, nothing to do with privilege. Privilege education and the rest. It's something maybe we haven't totally learned today in this country, but could you explain a little bit more about the Berns and the romantic poets, why they felt strongly about them? Gosh, again, I'm not a Berns scholar, so it's not, I mean, you should have asked your lecturer last week. I think that's a very good point about that sense of democracy of talent, but actually Keats has quite a complicated view of Berns. He goes into the cottage and he goes, oh, misery, and he talks about Berns and he says, oh my god, this man was a genius, but he talked with bitches and he drank with blaggers and he, you know, so he's not, you know, he does not have an idealized view of Keats, of Berns at all. And in a sense that, you know, that, you know, I don't think he has an idealized view of himself either. And I think that, I think, yes, I think he was very fascinated by the idea of this genius pouring out from somebody. And I don't know enough about the real Berns to know how much what Keats was imbibing was, to some extent, a myth of Berns, but that he saw Berns as somebody who, yeah, who had a miserable and in some ways quite sordid line. Thanks for that stuff. Any other questions, Norbert? Is this working? I was going to say that we studied as St. Agnesy at school, and I had a question about that, but you just said and answered the previous question, you said that the writing on Keats's grave suggests that he was hounded to death by his critics. That seems a terrible thing. Was that what Keats himself felt earlier? You implied that he was really shabby. That's a very, very interesting question. Just literally in the immediate aftermath of Keats having this horrific attack on him in Blackwood's magazine is the moment where he actually says to his brother, well, I believe I'll be among the English poets after my death. So in the moment, I don't, I think he's actually quite strong. I don't think he's, I don't think it's, it's undone. And he goes, and that's even before he's written his great masterpiece. He then goes on to write to have this wonderful flowering in the 1819. It was really Shelley, who in his, in the preface to his allergy Adonis, attacks these, particularly these right-wing magazines who have been so horrible about Keats. And it's, as I said, it's, you know, we're really talking politics here. I mean, because Shelley wants a reason to attack these right-wing magazines because Shelley's a radical and Shelley, I mean, yeah, so I mean, that myth really sort of begins with Shelley and then Keats' own friends sort of pick it up and add it on to the gravestone. I mean, the actual words are, yeah, this grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet who on his deathbed in the bitterness of his heart at the malicious power of his enemies desired that these words be engraved on his tombstone. Now, if you actually look at the, the letter written at the time when Keats comes up with that epitaph for himself, that he dictates to his friend Joseph Sevin, who's there with him in Rome nursing him. There's, in fact, Sevin says actually he went to sleep more peacefully that night. You know, there's, it is not connected in any way. Keats is not connecting this epitaph in any way with attacks on him by his enemies. And I think, you know, Shelley portrays him as this very sort of frail and fragile creature. And of course, you know, by the time he's dying, he's, he is incredibly frail and fragile, but it wasn't the assaults of the critics. It was tuberculosis that's been it to him. But the examples you read are truly horrifically vicious. Yeah, and I think what he found, but it was the, it was the sort of social snobbery as well, because he's quite sort of quite he's quite sensitive about that. And the way that Lockhart attacks him by saying, oh, Lockhart has actually found out the secret that Keats is a former apothecary's apprentice. Because in fact, because he's met a mutual friend of theirs as a dinner party. But Lockhart, you know, portrays it speaks as in from this position of sort of aristocratic otah complaining that too many people are writing poems these days, even our foot one composed tragedies. Now, these, this in this culture war, this is, this is all a bit of posturing. I mean, Lockhart, no way could Lockhart Lockhart afford a foot one. You know, I mean, he's a very highly educated young man. He's been to several universities and Keats hasn't been to any. But Keats finds this you know, he finds this not just patronising, he finds it really, really humiliating. He's very sort of touchy about his social status and he's really, you know, he's sort of a spite what he wants. He wants to be the Shelley or the Byron, but he hasn't got the social standing or really the money to be that. Well, I think it's terrible. Thank you. Well, I see what I detect to be a few thirsty faces around the audience. I think it's time now to thank Lucasta very much on behalf of the Society for following in the footsteps eventually of John Keats and making a visit to Glasgow. I don't think we've startled you in quite the way that the previous inhabitant did to Keats, but we hope not anyway. I should have said, you know, at no point have I have, have I, have I felt tempted to call the police and also I really have had the most unbelievably, wonderfully warm welcome. So we now have a much clearer idea of Keats's body and soul and that can be supplemented by a close reading of Lucasta's book, which may have been mentioned before. It only falls. So thank you so much. And that's worth a round of applause. I think we can