Extraordinary Genius

The impact of John Keats (1795-1821) is enhanced by his short life; the fact that he did not live past 25 is almost unbelievable when presented with the caliber of his work. By the age of 22, he had already written the 4,000+ lines of Endymion. A year later he had composed his six famous “Odes,” including “Ode to a Nightingale.”

Keats’ friend Charles Brown wrote this on the creation of the poem: 

“In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast table to the grass plot under a plum tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feeling on the song of our nightingale.”

I read “Ode to a Nightingale” in high school and was drawn to its melancholic Romanticism. My textbook also mentioned that F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) loved Keats, and used a line from this poem to name a novel (Tender is the Night.) With his recurring topics of beauty, transience, and unattainability, I later could see why Fitzgerald was drawn to Keats. 

Several years ago, I took this photo of a sweet, tattered butterfly on my windshield: “I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days—three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.” John Keats to Fanny Brawne, July 3, 1819

Recently I decided to find where Fitzgerald discussed Keats, and discovered that it was in a letter to his college-age daughter, written a few months before he died at age 44 (between them, Keats and Fitzgerald lived only 69 years.) Here is an important excerpt:

“[Poetry] isn’t something easy to get started on by yourself. You need, at the beginning, some enthusiast who also knows his way around—John Peale Bishop performed that office for me at Princeton. I had always dabbled in ‘verse’ but he made me see, in the course of a couple of months, the difference between poetry and non-poetry. After that one of my first discoveries was that some of the professors who were teaching poetry really hated it and didn’t know what it was about. I got in a series of endless scraps with them so that finally I dropped English altogether.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you—like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist—or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations. The Grecian Urn is unbearably beautiful with every syllable as inevitable as the notes in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or it’s just something you don’t understand. It is what it is because an extraordinary genius paused at that point in history and touched it. I suppose I’ve read it a hundred times. About the tenth time I began to know what it was about, and caught the chime in it and the exquisite inner mechanics. Likewise with The Nightingale which I can never read through without tears in my eyes; likewise the Pot of Basil with its great stanzas about the two brothers, ‘Why were they proud, etc.’; and The Eve of St. Agnes, which has the richest, most sensuous imagery in English, not excepting Shakespeare. And finally his three or four great sonnets, Bright Star and the others.

Knowing those things very young and granted an ear, one could scarcely ever afterwards be unable to distinguish between gold and dross in what one read. In themselves those eight poems are a scale of workmanship for anybody who wants to know truly about words, their most utter value for evocation, persuasion or charm. For a while after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.”

It is fun to trace the interests of talented people. One starts to imagine a quasi-family tree of influences, with genius instead of genes traveling through centuries and living on in later generations. I also like how Fitzgerald says that poetry is not easy, and one needs a knowledgable guide to appreciate it. (It’s hard not to think of Dead Poets Society when reading the first paragraph.) The reader can sense that Fitzgerald wanted to instill in his daughter the same appreciation that he had for Keats’ poetry. 

When I was in college I memorized “Ode to a Nightingale” and would recite it in my mind on walks to classes. Because it is so beautiful, it is easy to memorize, almost as if it were a song. Because it is May, I think of the poem, in particular the fifth stanza when Keats describes a dreamlike setting:

“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, 
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, 
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; 
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; 
Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves; 
And mid-May's eldest child, 
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, 
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.” 

In my design, I started with the grass, then the thicket, and finally the “fruit-tree wild,” which recalls “the grass plot under a plum tree” that Keats’ friend described above. I drew this as quickly as I could, trying not to overthink anything.