|
|
 |
| |
Ben Whishaw as Keats and Abbie Cornish as Fanny Brawne in Bright Star |
Travels with Keats in the realms of Gold
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
(7th edition).
Edited by Elizabeth Knowles.
Oxford University Press £30).
BEAUTY is truth, truth beauty’, that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to now.
In these two lines, from “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819), and taken from the 25 quotations he merits in this new treasure-house for quotation seekers, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, John Keats embraces his quest for inner and outer beauty that encompassed his short but enchanting life in the early 19th century.
Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,/And many goodly states and kingdoms seen: the first two much-anthologised lines from “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, dated two years earlier in 1817.
I shall give more of the nourishing flavour of his inner life from his lesser-known but equally amazing Letters.
In a letter to Benjamin Bailey dated July 18 1818, he gives us a clue why so much of his relationship with Fanny Brawne was shrouded in mystery: “I do think better of womankind than to suppose they care whether Mister John Keats five feet high likes them or not.” Thereby explaining his sense of inferiority.
Mind you, my guess is that Ben Whishaw, who plays Keats in Jane Campion’s film Bright Star, is a good five feet nine inches.
To George and Thomas Keats (1818): “There is nothing stable in the world – uproar’s your only music".
To JH Reynolds: “There is an awful warmth about my heart like a load of immortality” (1818).
To Fanny Brawne: “I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute” (1819).
To Shelley: “‘Load every rift’ of your subject with ore” (1820).
To return to where we began, Keats’ obsessional quest for inner beauty: Stanza 8 of “Ode to a Nightingale”: Was it a vision, or a waking dream?/ Fled is that music: – do I wake or sleep?
Lastly from “The Fall of Hyperion” (1819):
The poet and the dreamer are distinct,/
Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes./
The one pours out a balm upon the world,/
The other vexes.
In other words, you have to be a tough old bugger to be an authentic poet, as William Empson and WH Auden both were.
Empson introduced me to his wife Hetta, when they lived at Studio House in Hampstead Hill Gardens, with a pun on the word bore. He meant that she came from South Africa. He fares far less well than Keats in Elizabeth Knowles’ major new edition of the much loved 1,155-page Oxford Dictionary. But then he has only been dead since 1984.
Two quotations from two of his most powerful poems included are:
You don’t want madhouse and the whole thing there (“Let It Go”, 1955) and Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills./ It is not the effort nor the failure tires./ The waste remains, the waste remains and kills. (“Missing Dates”, 1935).
I have no doubt that this one last line, which I heard him declaim in his unique style of Victorian camp at Pentameters Theatre in Hampstead, echoing as it does Shakespeare, is one of the very greatest in the whole of 20th-century poetry.
Alan Bennett – whose new play The Habit of Art is at the National Theatre – is also thinly represented. He is still mercifully in the land of the living, so he doesn’t count. Less forgiveably, Elizabeth Knowles hasn’t caught up with one of his most memorable lines defining history: “It’s just one bloody thing after another bloody thing.”
Barack Obama, with one solitary quotation, has the last word: “The arc of history is long but it bends towards justice”(2007).
JOHN HORDER
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
