So Bright and Delicate by John Keats
So Bright and Delicate by John Keats
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Wednesday, 18, Nov 2009 12:34
Penguin Classics, out now.
What's it all about?
New collection featuring some of Keats' finest verses, and his love letters to Fanny Brawne, timed to coincide with the release of the film Bright Star. It chronicles Keats' love for Miss Brawne from youthful puppy love to more intense emotions, right through to the paranoid hurt and misery of being separated due to his tuberculosis at the end of his life.
Who's it by?
Well, obviously the letters and the poems are by John Keats, one of the great Romantic poets and generally considered to be one of the best writers in the English language. This particular collection includes an introduction by Oscar-winning director Jane Champion, who decided to make a film about the love story between Keats and Brawne, and bring out an accompanying collection of his work, after being inspired by Andrew Motion's biography of the poet. Her film Bright Star, starring Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish, was released this month.
Interestingly, the book includes none of the letters Fanny Brawne wrote to Keats as these have not survived. The letters she wrote to him after he moved to Italy (he left London in order to try and cope better with his illness) were buried, unopened.
As an example...
"I kiss'd your writing over in the hope you had indulg'd me by leaving a trace of honey," is the playful, warm language Keats signs off his first recorded letter in. But even within the earliest letters, there are occasional signs of the (some would say darker) emotional intensities to come. As early as July 1819, Keats was ruminating: "I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death." He goes on to write that he "hates the world" and wishes he could "take a sweet poison from your lips to send me out of it."
As Keats begins to suffer from tuberculosis, the same illness his brother died from, this morbid wish for death draws closer to becoming reality, and as it does so, Keats becomes angry, paranoid, and petulant. Possessively, he writes, while preparing to leave for Italy: "You are to me an object intensely desirable - the air I breathe in a room empty of you is unhealthy." He tortures himself with thoughts of the future lovers Fanny will have after his death, and begs her "by the blood of that Christ you believe in" never to write to him again unless she can always remain "chaste you, virtuous you" and write with a "crystal conscience". Whether she gave him any grounds for suspicion of infidelity we do not know for certain because her letters to him have not survived, but his next letters suggest an acknowledgement on his part that he knows himself to be irrational in these fears.
In his penultimate letter, he is directly apologetic for the earlier passionate outbursts, blaming them on the strength of his feelings for her, begging that his name never pass her lips when speaking to "those laughers" who "do not like me". He longs to believe in immortality, and promises, until he dies, to be as "patient in illness and as believing in Love" as he is able. He died shortly after writing this letter.
What the others say
"Following the opening earlier this month of Bright Star, Jane Campion's film about the love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, Penguin has clearly decided to target young, love-sick girls, which inevitably means lots of flowers on the cover of this collection of letters and poems from Keats to his neighbour. Yet I'm not sure those girls will find what they're looking for in this book: the bulk is about the misery and pain of the reality of love, not its joys." - Lesley McDowell, Independent
Boyd Tonkin of The Independent says the quick packaging of a new Keats collection to coincide with the film is "smart" and writes that "with luck, the film ought also to ignite curiosity about other aspects of Keats' career", prompting greater sales than is usual for poetry collections.
Cosmo Landesman from the Times says that the film and the poems selected to accompany it here "hardly do Keats justice". According to him, Campion's selective portrayal suggests "there#s something wet and passive about this Keats. [In the film] When the tearful Fanny asks why he can't cancel his journey to Italy, he tells her it's because his friends have already bought the ticket. What kind of Romantic poet puts the price of a boat ticket before true love? - the real Keats was far more cruel, manipulative and, at times, ambivalent about Fanny." He goes on to point out that when writing to others such as his brother Keats is less than warm towards his muse; he writes that Fanny's nostrils are "a little painful" and her profile is "better than her full face", while this collection only includes the letters he wrote to Fanny herself.
So is it any good?
Romantic love is so often dismissed as naïve or irrelevant nowadays that a lot of people have an automatic aversion to the idea love poetry - especially classical love poetry. The very notion of writing a love poem about someone is such an intense expression of emotion, and so cynical are we about each other's intentions, that the poet's actual motivations for writing one, let alone the emotion expressed in this way, is often seen as false and/or unhealthily passionate. Many modern critics, especially those who take a feminist reading of literature, are quick to scorn the idolisation of a Romantic subject, and doubt the sincerity.
Certainly if we start imagining Keats to be made in the image of Ben Whishaw and picture him writing love poetry with a dopey look on his face while staring around vapidly, then perhaps then it's not surprising that there's a public perception of love poetry as insincere, sappy tosh which isn't relevant to our modern cynical age of 'smart love'. (Which is somehow supposed to stop us all getting hurt, but clearly doesn't.) True romance, as it is often portrayed, is for the naïve; a sign of weakness in men and a sign of conformity, or even evidence of a loss of independence, in women.
Once you read the actual writings of John Keats, however, this perception falls apart entirely. First of all, even in the works where the subject matter is pure love story, such as St Agnes Eve, the poem is still about more than just the feelings between two lovers - certainly more than just an expression of his own love for Fanny Brawne. Rather than make the poem about him and his own particular muse, Keats draws on the raw energy of his own feelings to colour his narrator's perception of the world, allowing him to recreate a famous classical story in a fresh way, based on own unique experience of love. For example, he cleverly explores the alteration of perception through love; there is so much passion in the characters' hearts that even the most unlikely objects become personified in the most glorious of ways. Early in the poem there are "snarling" trumpets and inanimate furniture appears as staring "carved angels, ever eager-eyed". As the lovers sneak away in the middle of the night, the wind is "besieging", and carpets "glide like phantoms" around them.
Another thing about this collection that reminds you how genuine the Romantic poets were in their explosive sentiments of passion is the consistency between the way love is portrayed in Keats' poetry, and the way he expresses his own personal love in his letters to Fanny Brawne. There is no attempt to make himself appear 'manly' or heroic (not even a Byronic kind of heroism). In fact, Jane Campion writes in her introduction that when Keats' letters were first released, some fifteen years after his death, they were spurned by most people as "unmanly" and "unproper". This could because Keats is a cowardly fool of a man who feels love in a way which is somehow the 'incorrect' way to love someone, but I don't think so. Surely, it is because Keats writes honestly about love, warts and all. He doesn't assume a false 'manly' posture designed to impress various elements of society ("those laughers who do not like me"), and nor does he demand Fanny to adopt any forced roles herself in order to be worthy of his love. If anything, he longs for her to be less beloved in society, although this is likely to be out of jealousy than anything else. When Keats writes "I look not forward... to what is call#d being settled in the world; I tremble at domestic cares - yet for you I would meet them", this is a thousand times more honest than any 'honourable' nonsense about buying her flowers and longing to be married and buy her hats (or whatever so-called 'manly' men were expected to write in those days; presumably the handwritten equivalent of flashing your Benz keys and picking up the tab in The Groucho.) And it gets better; Keats goes on to reassure Fanny that it is entirely up to her whether they make their relationship acceptable to society. He writes of his earlier promise, "if it would leave you the happier, I would rather die than do so [meet the aforementioned 'domestic cares']".
In an age of spin and manipulation, externalism and materialism; a time when relationships are defined by the four narrow dropdown options allowed for in a facebook profile, and irony is so engrained in everything we say no-one can even remember if they're telling each other the truth or not, the concept of writing painstakingly-crafted love letters and philosophical love poetry to celebrate the simple wonderfulness that just colliding with one particular person can shake up all the colours of your universe, might seem like a joke. And in age of meticulous planning ahead and balancing of mortgages, a relationship like Keats' and Brawne's, with no long-term future whatsoever, is probably what many of us would call a failure. A waste of time. John Keats' poems and letters do more than just tell us about how love feels for one man. They remind us that love, purely for the sake of love, is beautiful, enriching, enlightening - and never, ever a waste of our time.
10/10
Louise McCudden