A Month with Keats: Keats and Wentworth House

Anita Miller, our guide on the Keats Walk, leads us from Hampstead Heath and back toward the town of Hampstead. We pass a small circus, with circus music and clowns smoking cigarettes behind the big tent. We make our way through the crowds to a narrow street called Keats Grove. About four houses down, we come upon Wentworth House.

John Keats in his study by Joseph Severn

The house was built in 1816, not long before John Keats first encountered it. As our guide and the docent at the house tell us, it was originally what we Americans call a duplex, with a wall dividing the house into two separate residences. The left side was occupied by Charles Armitage Brown, Keats’ good friend and hiking companion, and Keats himself after his brother Tom died in December 1818. On the right was the Dilke family, who moved out and replaced by the Brawne family, including the eldest daughter, Frances, or Fanny, who became Keats’ great love and fiancée.

A meeting room on the left has been added in the recent past, suitable for lectures, poetry readings and other literary activities. Four rooms downstairs mirror four rooms upstairs, divided by the staircase, with the kitchen in the basement.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Wentworth House, known as Keats House today, where Keats wrote some of his greatest poems.

A Month of Keats: Keats and Hampstead Heath

Our Keats Walk in Hampstead in north London, led by guide Anita Miller, has brought us to Hampstead Heath. Our first time on the Heath was a week before, when we visited Kenwood House. Kenwood is on the north side of the Heath, the place occupied by the various earls of Mansfield (and the setting for the 2013 movie “Belle,” which is well worth seeing). The house includes an incredibly fine art collection, including a Rembrandt, a Vermeer, some Constables, a Gainsborough or two, a Van Dyck, and many others.

John Keats by Joseph Severn, 1819

Today we’re on the south side of the Heath (and it’s a big heath). We have just crossed the street from Well Walk and entered what is a forested part of the area.

This is a place John Keats knew well. He would often walk from where he lived on Well Walk across part of the heath to Wentworth House, where his good friend Charles Armitage Brown lived. Brown was the companion who spent 48 days hiking Scotland with Keats, and the friend who would offer Keats a place to live after his brother Tom died in late 1818.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: A forested part of Hampstead Heath.

A Month with Keats: Poetry, Religion and Politics

We’re standing on Church Row in Hampstead, in north London. Church Row is the oldest street in Hampstead, a longish block of attached townhomes lining both sides of the street from the shopping area to the Parish Church of St. John at Hampstead.

Portrait of John Keat by William Hilton, National Portrait Gallery, London

Anita Miller, our guide for this Saturday “Keats Walk,” stops our group of 12 in front of one of the homes in the middle of the block. “This has nothing to do with Keats,” she says, “but notice the windows above each of the doors. Each one is different, because before the era of numbered addresses, that’s how you told people to find your house.”

The houses date from the 1700s, as does the church at the end of the street – 1747, to be exact, although there’s been a church on the property here for more than 1,000 years. It’s the church most associated with John Keats, because it contains a bust of the poet donated by an American admirer in the 1890s. Fanny Brawne, the young woman Keats was engaged to at the time of his death in 1821, was baptized here and attended the church with her family. But Keats, apparently, never set foot inside the building. He was an atheist, after all.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Church Row in Hampstead in north London.

A Month with Keats: A Walk into His Life

We’re standing on the sidewalk outside the Hampstead tube station north London, right on the southern edge of Hampstead Heath. We’ve taken the tube from near our hotel in Westminster to the Embankment station, and changed to the Northern line. We find ourselves this busy Saturday morning at the major crossroads of Hampstead – the intersection of Hampstead High Street and Rosslyn Hill.

We’re waiting for John Keats.

Portrait of John Keats by Joseph Severn, 1816.

More precisely, we’re waiting for Anita Miller, our guide for the monthly Keats Walk in Hampstead. We booked our tickets online through what is today the John Keats House (also known as the Wentworth House) in Hampstead. The tour will end at the house, but we have about two hours of walking, stopping and listening before we arrive at the house. My wife would want me to point out that it’s less a walk and more a hike – Hampstead and the Heath are hilly, and some areas are more suitable for mountain goats.

Our group is eclectic, with one exception – most of the 12 of us are female. I’m one of two men, and the other looks like he’s come along at his girlfriend’s request. Our ages range from high school to Baby Boomer.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Hampstead Tube Station in north London.

Nicholas Roe’s “John Keats”

He was 25 when he died. In his lifetime, he published all of 54 poems, and wrote a total of 150. He was seen by many as something of a radical, abandoning the poetry written by John Dryden and Alexander Pope and instead loosening poetic forms, and thus inviting massive cultural and societal change (they took poetry rather seriously in the early 1800s). Upon his death, he slipped into a shallow obscurity, and it would take Alfred, Lord Tennyson to resurrect his poetry and his reputation.

Today, he’s seen as one of the “Big 5” of Romantic poetry – William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron (aka George Gordon). And John Keats.

We usually meet Keats and his fellow Romantic poets in high school English classes, and we wonder why anyone would write a poem about a Greek pot. Or a nightingale. Love poems we understand, but this other stuff seems a little strange. It often takes a gifted teacher to help us understand what poems like “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” are really about.

In September, my wife and I had the opportunity to join a “Keats Walk” in Hampstead and Hampstead Heath in north London, led by the able guide Anita Miller. Hampstead is the area most associated with Keats, the area where he lived for a time, and many of his greatest poems were written there. (Starting tomorrow, I have a series of four articles at Tweetspeak Poetry in November that explore the walk, the poetry, and the impact and influence of Keats). The walk ended at Keats House, almo known as Wentworth House, and it was there I bought the 2012 biography of Keats by Nicholas Roe, simply entitled John Keats.

A number of good biographies of Keats have been published, including ones by W. Jackson Bate, former British poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Sidney Colvin (an older biography free on Amazon Kindle under public domain), and the pre-Raphaelite writer William Rossetti (also free on Amazon Kindle). Nicholas Roe’s biography likely exceeds them all – meticulously researched, exploring both Keats’ life and his poetry, documenting what is and isn’t known about the poet, his family, and his poetry.

Roe, professor of English Literature at St. Andrews University in Scotland, brings a wealth of both professional, academic and perhaps even personal understanding to his subject. He’s the author of Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (1990); John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (1999); The Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries (2002); Leigh Hunt: Life, Poetics, Politics (2003); Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt (2005); and Romanticism: An Oxford Guide (2005). He’s also served as editor of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life (2002); Keats and History (2007); and English Romantic Writers and the West Country (2010).

Nicholas Roe

If his publications weren’t enough, Roe is also chair of The Keats Foundation, Keats House, Hampstead,  and a trustee of The Wordsworth Trust, The Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, and The Wordsworth Conference Foundation. He’s one of the leading Romantic era scholars.

His biography of Keats is that of an academic, yes, but an academic who has broadened his writing style to embrace a more general interested reader. And the picture of Keats he presents is more of a complete one, that of a rising poet conscious of what it takes to succeed in poetry, dealing with family tragedies and illness for almost all of his young life, and a poet who could quickly dash off a beautiful poem while more experienced, practiced poets would agonize. Keats was also the poet somewhat sneered at by critics; he did not arise from the gentlemanly, educated classes but from a more middle-class commercial one (Keats, Roe points out, was often cited by contemporary critics as a “Cockney poet”).

Well-researched and extensively footnoted, Roe’s John Keats provides tremendous insight into the poet who almost fell into obscurity but whose poetry would influence Tennyson, the pre-Raphaelites, Pound, Yeats, Eliot, Derek Waldcott and Seamus Heaney, and the poet who wrote some of the most beautiful poems in the English language. It’s an excellent biography.

To see the start of the series on Keats in Hampstead and the Keats Walk, please visit Tweetspeak Poetry tomorrow.

Painting: John Keats on Hampstead Heath by Joseph Severn.