John Keats, who was kill’d off by one critique,
Just as he really promis’d something great,
If not intelligible, without Greek
Contriv’d to talk about the gods of late,
Much as they might have been suppos’d to speak.
Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate;
‘Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuff’d out by an article.
Lord Byron
Don Juan (1819–1824), Canto XI, LX
He has outsoar’d the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world’s slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain;
Nor, when the spirit’s self has ceas’d to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.
Shelley
Adonais (1821), XL
The best-known episode in the black legend of literary criticism is the death of John Keats. While the young bard, called upon by his peers to sooner or later inherit Shakespeare’s crown, wasted away in Rome, dying of tuberculosis on February 23, 1821, his great contemporaries, Shelley (1792–1822) and Byron (1788–1824), transformed his death into the fatal consequence of a battle of the ancient against the modern, and Keats into the victim, before the Most High, of the literary critics.
All three of the modern men mentioned above became our own ancients without ever reaching old age themselves. Shelley drowned on July 8, 1822, sailing his luxury yacht back from a visit to Byron himself in Livorno. Shelley’s body washed up on the beach ten days later, eaten away by fish and recognizable only because he had in his pocket a copy of Keats, to whom he had dedicated Adonais, a work renowned among all elegies. In this long poem, even Death herself laments having claimed her victim, and Shelley foretells his own watery death, which was predictable: he was a keen and reckless sailor.1
Byron also died soon after, in Missolonghi, on April 19, 1824, killed by neither the Turks nor his critics, but by his doctors, who mercilessly bled him. The failed liberator of the Greeks had denounced Keats, who respected him with no great vigor. For Shelley and Byron, Keats never recovered from the violent reviews he garnered in the summer of 1819 for his Endymion, from two conservative publications: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the Quarterly Review. This had accelerated his consumption: the set of symptoms that doctors would only decades later come to diagnose as tuberculosis.
No less furious were Keats’ personal friends, who even disobeyed his last will: to be buried, as he was, in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery under a headstone that would say only, “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water,” which Julio Cortázar, surely the great Keatsian of the Spanish language, translated as, “Yace aquí uno cuyo nombre fue escrito en el agua.” But in the winter of 1823, Charles Brown, who later regretted this act of disrespect and sought unsuccessfully to have the headstone modified to restore the perfect austerity Keats had desired, added the following unsolicited explanation: “This Grave contains all that was Mortal of a young english poet who on his Death Bed in the Bitterness of His Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies Desired these Words to be engraven on this Tomb Stone ‘Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water’ Feb 24th 1821.”2
Keats did not die of reviews, but of tuberculosis, as we know. The same illness had taken his mother and his brother Tom, for whom John himself diligently cared—Lionel Trilling said within Keats, unlike the aristocratic Byron or the radical Shelley, the romantic poet coexisted with the most exemplary family man—during his terminal phase, until his death in December of 1818. His brother George died of the same malady in 1844, after emigrating to the United States at around the same time.3 Furthermore, after Endymion was panned by the Tory press, Keats wrote his immortal odes and his best-regarded letters (as a practitioner of the epistolary genre, Keats was the first modern writer to be suspected of practicing a low art better than a high one. Before him, critics may have made the mistake of thinking Voltaire was a great historian or playwright, but no one dared say he might go down in history for his correspondence or for Candide).
But some doubts remain: doubts I shall endeavor to clear up as a curious student of my craft’s history and, in particular, of its legends. Who were these malevolent reviewers? Did they write mere “insults and slanders,” as Shelley put it in his preface to Adonais, or, amid their evident political acrimony, did these supposed killers perhaps have a point? What kind of poem was Endymion? How did Keats take these aggressive reviews? How exactly did Byron and Shelley posthumously “defend” him?
My guide is a paper I found in the Annals of the Royal Society of Literature, in the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library, titled “Keats and his Critics” (1956). It is by Duff Cooper (1890-1953), who was Viscount Norwich, as well as a conservative politician and diplomat, making him the ideal candidate to be, as he was, Talleyrand’s biographer. To my reading of this twentieth-century Tory, I shall add more recent discoveries surrounding this quarrel, for that is what it was. Cooper admits from the start that it was a matter of politics, drawing a comparison to what, sixty years ago, was still an outrage to the leftist press: recognizing the greatness of Rudyard Kipling despite their antipathy over his imperial conservatism (with a great deal of fine print, but that’s another matter). Right off the bat, Cooper justifies the Tories’ aggression as an overt reaction to an offensive from their Whig opposition, entrenched in literary terms in the Edinburgh Review and politically in the Examiner, the newspaper founded by the man who discovered Keats’ genius, James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784–1859). Hunt was quite the character: he started out promoting Shelley, introduced him to Keats, and ended up freeloading off Byron in Italy, where the lord-cum-poet, on his way to becoming a revolutionary, abandoned him en route to Greece, tired of bankrolling him and his abundant family. We should read Hunt (those who reread him died generations ago): he was a famously bad poet, a fleetingly successful comedic playwright, a major literary critic, and a fallacious amanuensis. But around him he gathered the second generation of English Romantics, who died young, unlike the previous generation consisting of the relatively long-lived Wordsworth (1770–1850) and Coleridge (1872–1834), whom Hunt detested for having grown conservative with age.
Hunt was a supporter of liberal causes plagued by financial problems, and one of Keats’ few political sonnets (Keats, despite his own liberalism, disagreed with Hazlitt’s Napoleomania, and, being a poor medical student, did not idealize poverty like Shelley and Byron) celebrates his release in 1816. Hunt was jailed for three years—in very comfortable conditions, according to Cooper—for having mocked the English Regency (1811–1820), established when King George III, sick with porphyria (a form of madness highly particular to British monarchs), was declared unfit to govern. Hunt held the key, the Viscount Norwich tells us, and the very young Keats wanted in.
On the other side, the reviewers who took part in Keats’ lynching were John Gibson Lockhart (1794–1854) and John Wilson Croker (1780–1857), one in Blackwood’s and the other in the Quarterly. Both left little to posterity. In 1820, Lockhart, who signed his review of Endymion as “Z,” became the son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott, the leading literary figure of the conservatives, while Croker, Secretary to the Admiralty, was only an aspiring poet, according to the footnotes to the Norton edition of Keats’ Poetry and Prose.
Of the two reviews, the more insulting is Lockhart’s. He starts by accusing Keats of suffering “Metromanie,” a vulgar passion that drives the unsophisticated to set everything to rhyme, be it comedy or tragedy. He laments that nature has granted Keats a higher talent than that which should befall a hard-up medical student. He has replaced the frenzy of his first Poems (1817) with the idiocy of Endymion, Lockhart claims. But his true target is not Keats, but rather Hunt and his Cockney School, which is typical of London, a land of excess and slovenliness. It was not the first time, but rather the fourth, that the Blackwood’s critic would rail against “the land of Cockaigne,” a phrase coined in this publication to refer to Hunt’s entire circle in contrast to the thick sap (and gab) of the Lake District poets, ex-romantics or neo-conservatives to a man. Although prose stylists like Hazlitt and Lamb were also considered, imprecisely, to be Huntians, Cooper says, “Z’s” malice lay in blasting not them—men of vigorous, lofty prose who could defend themselves with advantage—but rather a young, almost unknown poet whose only sin was his loyalty to Hunt.
The poet Andrew Motion, author of a respectable Keats (1997), sheds light on the number of vices attributed, from the Tory ranks, to the Cockney School: beyond political struggle, there was class disapproval and aesthetic hostility. Keats’ (ultimately revolutionary) refusal to equate each verse to a closed idea was seen as unread and noxious digression, an effeminate subversion typical of the lower classes whose ascent towards any and all higher levels of society, including the literary, outraged the Tories. Lockhart ended his review in Blackwood’s with an insult for the ages: Keats, who had been an outstanding medical student but had abandoned this path for poetry, was reduced to a mere “apothecary,” and Lockhart said it was better to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet.
They blamed Byron, I’m afraid. I believe they saw in Byron’s Don Juan—one of the least read and studied cornerstones of modern literature—a deserter who had let fall from the ship of aristocracy the lifeboats that would not only keep the masses from drowning but also allow them to board, en masse, the fleet of the nobility.
According to Lockhart, Keats blasphemed against the highest values of the literature of the Ancien Régime, like Pope and Boileau, though he ridiculed the young poet with a method as effective as it was lazy, quoting him out of context and mocking him, applying Richelieu’s maxim: “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” “Z” did not hide the notion that Keats was doubly guilty for belonging, not only literarily but also politically, to the damnable Cockney School: the equivalent, ten years earlier, of the freshly revolutionary French Romanticism of Hugo and his friends across the channel on the eve of the July Revolution.
(Sauvage Atelier, 2025)
(Sauvage Atelier, 2025)Wilson Croker’s review had more substance. For a long time, it was attributed to his editor at the Quarterly Review, William Gifford, who surely guided the reviewer’s hand. Motion decries the blindness of both Tory reviewers, unable to perceive Keats’ patriotism—even in order to rebut it—as well as his social and sexual liberalism, and his ideas about power and legitimacy; after all, Endymion, as well as the unfinished Hyperion (1820) and The Fall of Hyperion (published posthumously in 1856), were mythological poems that had to be read as metaphors for the post-Napoleonic world. Or did they? That was where Keats indirectly conceded that his critics were right, by abandoning Hyperion and attempting to rewrite it, just as he admitted that his admiration for John Milton had blinded him as he wrote Endymion.
While the former is a hymn to beauty as embodied in eternal youth—that of the shepherd prince who falls in love with Cynthia, the moon—in Hyperion, the sun and the sun alone is able to rally the vanquished titans against the new gods. Keats had failed, he thought, as a narrative poet, as was also evident to his gang of conservative critics. Greek myth was waning as the mold for all aspects of humanity, and neoclassicism, having grown old, was fading away; so much so that the next era of Keats’ work, marked by the phenomenal odes of 1820, brought with it not an abandonment of Greek inspiration but rather its purification, as Hölderlin has understood it on the mainland, in Germany, a generation before. Keats attains this absolute refinement with his “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and thus the neoclassical atrezzo of the eighteenth century was left behind, abandoning those unintelligible and false Greek deities that Byron, in his verses dedicated to the unfortunate Keats, had lamented his devising. It is apparent, though seldom mentioned, that Keats belonged to a generation no longer truly capable of reading classical Greek. Perhaps this ignorance was necessary in order to inter the Grecian urn, before it was immortalized.
Keats’ epic poems are occasionally rich in beauty—with admirable passages that are worth the entire oeuvre of our Meléndez Valdés or Navarretes, and that render entirely obsolete the poetry of the then-famous Abbé Delille, who died to glory and encomia in 1813—but, on the whole, they fall short. But perhaps the reviews in Blackwood’s and the Quarterly were more helpful to Keats than to his false friend and latecoming admirer, Byron—who glorified them for their supposed ability to “snuff out” such a “fiery particle” with a mere “article”—when it came to distinguishing the poet from the dreamer and the healer, and understanding how poetry might confront “negative capability”: that which is mysterious, contradictory, and irresolvable.
Byron had no love for Keats, and when Jeffrey, one of the critics who fairly appraised Endymion, spoke highly of him, the lord lashed out (again, more so for being friends with Hunt), demanding of The Edinburgh Review’s editor that he leave him out: “No more Keats, I entreat:—flay him alive; if some of you don’t, I must skin him myself: there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.” Byron boasted of having endured much harsher critiques than those that killed Keats, as he wrote to Murray: “I know, by experience, that a savage review is hemlock to a sucking author,” though he survived them by drinking three bottles of claret. “Review people have no more right to kill than any other footpads,” concludes a Byron who was glaringly late and scarcely woeful to mourn Keats’ death and his “critical murder.” “However, he who would die of an article in a review would have died of something else equally trivial.”
Nor were the tears of the affectionate Shelley particularly compassionate to Keats’ memory. How could Shelley, who died with a copy of Keats in his jacket pocket, have truly believed, after reading him in 1820, that the reviews produced “the most violent effect on his susceptible mind,” as he wrote in his preface to Adonais? I think, deep down, both Shelley and Byron felt a contrite, glum gladness over Keats’ death, even though their own was encrypted within it. Just as Keats’ death had followed Chatterton’s, whose early death made him the first chosen poet of the gods, as the cliché went.
Although Keats had active, contemporary defenders, and was not the way Shelley and Byron depicted him—as merely a victim of the critics, postmortem—the poet’s own official version of his reaction to the negative reviews was one of imperturbability. He famously wrote to J.A. Hessey on October 8, 1818, “Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own Works. My own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could possibly inflict—and also when I feel I am right, no external praise can give me such a glow as my own solitary reperception and ratification of what is fine. J[ohn]. S[cott]. is perfectly right in regard to the slip-shod Endymion. That it is so is no fault of mine. No!—though it may sound a little paradoxical. It is as good as I had power to make it—by myself…”
This imperturbability, along with the curious fact that Keats paid no great heed to the mostly political motive (“against the Cockney School,” Lord Houghton would later say) behind the attacks, allowed the Victorians to embalm the tuberculous poet. Keats was neither “satanic” like Byron nor an advocate for dissolute social and sexual utopias like Shelley. He had died young, but with an air of saintliness, more neoclassical than romantic, immune, as Shelley put it, to the “contagion of the world’s slow stain.”
It took some time to substantiate the truth of Keats’ private reaction to his critics. Shelley must be credited as the first to doubt that the comments in Blackwood’s and the Quarterly were like water off a duck’s back to his young friend, though he gossipped, hyperbolically, about Keats giving himself over to drink, threatening to never write again and to take his own life, having fallen victim to “insanity” in September of 1818.
In 1848, Richard Monckton Milnes (1809–1885), Lord Houghton, published The Life and Letters of John Keats, which allowed for greater knowledge of the poet’s suffering at the hands of the critics: from his zealous efforts to maintain his originality, including before his admired Hunt, and even prior to the Tories’ attack, to his certainty of finding a safe haven in posterity. On February 14, 1819, he confided in his brother George and his sister-in-law that he had “no doubt of success in a course of years if I persevere—but it must be patience, for the Reviews have enervated and made indolent men’s minds—few think for themselves. These Reviews too are getting more and more powerful, especially the Quarterly—they are like a superstition which the more it prostrates the Crowd and the longer it continues the more powerful it becomes just in proportion to their increasing weakness.”
Only in 1925, when it was reproduced in Shelley and Keats as they struck their contemporaries, did there come to light a letter to The Morning Chronicle signed “Y,” dated July 27, 1821, five months after Keats’ death. Its anonymous author introduced himself as one of the poet’s old classmates who, as it happens, had introduced him to Hunt and another of his protectors, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon. We now know that “Y” was Charles Cowden Clarke, and his version of events seems to be the most accurate. Keats was killed by neither Lockhart nor Croker, but by the tuberculous infection he contracted as a result of devotedly caring for his brother Tom; tuberculosis is not necessarily hereditary, but it is highly contagious. Clarke goes on to say that Keats’ nobility of heart, his hypersensitivity, could not have left him monkishly indifferent to his attackers, aware as he was that his gravest sin had been his loyalty to Hunt, who was almost guilty of a crime of lèse-majesté (having survived his famous friends, an impoverished Hunt died with a shameful reputation as debtor and rogue, but in 1821 he was the beloved patron of a new literature: the often unemphatic Virginia Woolf considered him one of the fathers of the modern world).
Keats, according to Clarke’s truthful testimony, suffered enormously from the bad reviews (whole nights of insomnia), and assigned them value beyond mere political malice. They drove him to start writing Hyperion, which left him dissatisfied in turn. Lastly, Nicholas Roe, his best-qualified current biographer, claims that “Johnny” Keats’ detractors knew what they were doing: after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, they waged a culture war against those they considered the true enemy within (even writing in 1953, the Tory Cooper is outraged by Hazlitt’s love of Bonaparte, and compares it to many of his contemporaries’ fondness for Stalin).
In the end, Keats was killed not by the critics, nor even by those whose actions were guided by their prejudices (very few, present company included, hold them back in the face of the new) and their evident partisan furor. Rather, what was metaphorically murdered in 1818 was literary criticism, accused by the most famous poets of its time of being slanderous, pernicious, mean-spirited, and without principles. But someone, even before Keats’ death, raised a hand in defense of the so-called inept muse and her besmirchers. The editors of Keats’ last book (Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, 1820), with zeal to spare, dared to include a warning stating that, if Hyperion had been left unfinished, this was because the poet, hoping to give it the same dimensions as his lambasted Endymion, had been disheartened by the latter’s violent reception. In a copy belonging to a banker who asked for an autograph, seven months before his death, Keats furiously crossed out this warning and wrote in by hand: “I Had not part in this; I was ill at the time. This is a lie.”
The lie that Keats was killed by the literary critics has survived. Old Coleridge repeated it, and many others after him. Hazlitt believed it always. The Reactionaries, on the other hand, hated him: Carlyle, referring to the first, apologetic biography of Keats by Lord Houghton, said it sought to make us eat an exquisitely cooked dish of dead dog. The Victorian Matthew Arnold, who was a critic first and foremost, surmised that Keats’ “power of moral interpretation” allowed him to absorb the critics’ blows against his Greek poems. Despite being reviled, Keats was a hero thanks to his “negative capability,” for having been a master of a form of self-criticism: an artist’s character is safeguarded in his creation, which is imperfect. If someone must be vicariously blamed for Keats’ death, blame politics. We can blame the colossal Byron and Shelley for having made humanity believe that criticism could kill a writer, thereby justifying the empty sobbing of so many bad and hypersensitive poets in years hence. In the case of John Keats, criticism, even at its basest, contributed to the splendor of a genius.
2014
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
1 Besides Adonais, Shelley wrote in his “Fragment on Keats (who desired that on his tomb should be inscribed),” “‘Here lieth One whose name was writ on water.’ / But, ere the breath that could erase it blew, / Death, in remorse for that fell slaughter…”, No despertéis a la serpiente, p. 151.
2 In Stanley Plumly, Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography (New York: Norton, 2008), p. 77.
3 The family biography has gotten popular of late, just as family medicine was booming some time ago. The whole Bloomsbury entourage, it seems to me, has fallen victim to biographies. But the biography of Keats and his brother George is highly recommendable: Denise Gigante, The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2011).
