Book review: ‘John Keats: Poetry, Life and Landscapes’ by Suzie Grogan

by Ian Reynolds

In 2009, or thereabouts, I was in a charity shop and, somewhat on a whim, I bought a copy of the late Stanley Plumly’s book Posthumous Keats: a Personal Biography. I had vaguely heard the story about the young poet John Keats dying in Rome, his potential, as yet, unfulfilled. I knew nothing more about Keats and I thought I was buying a normal biography, but I was wrong —Plumly’s book was not a traditional biography written in a linear chronological manner—the structure of the book was circular rather than linear, each chapter formed from a single theme relative to Keats the individual, and as a poet. It was informative, but lacked scholarly detail, however, for a novice like me it served a useful purpose as being a highly readable introduction to John Keats. It was a taster and it got me firmly hooked.

Similarly, I feel Suzie Grogan’s latest book John Keats: Poetry, Life and Landscapes will serve the same purpose as Plumly’s. The writing style is informal, unstuffy, written in the first person, and is almost conversational. The author takes the reader on a journey of discovery of the life of Keats the person and the places he visited during his short life. The book is interlaced with the author’s personal memories, Keats’s letters to friends and family, and of course, the poetry. What shines through in the book is the author’s lifelong passion for poetry and for John Keats. The beginning started aged twelve, when she was drawn into a Blue Peter Special Assignment in which Keats featured. She bought a book of poems, Robert Gittings’s 1968 biography, and a lifelong passion began.

Concerning Keats the person, Grogan ably debunks the urban legend about his fragility of mind and the suggestion that bad reviews of his poems had hastened his untimely death. In his lifetime, he only published three volumes of poetry: the self-published Poems (1817), the erratic and, some would say, over-ambitious Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818), and finally Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and other poems (1820). She describes his witty, warm yet pugnacious character—a good man to have in your corner in troublesome times—a far cry from the romantic myth created by others, including Shelley in his Adonais poem following Keats’s death, and Lord Byron’s Don Juan quip that Keats was ‘snuffed out by an Article’—far from it, he was just getting into his stride before illness and death intervened.

The places and landscapes are many in the book, and they are not set out in strict chronological order, as the author literally takes the reader in her footsteps from Keats’s early beginnings in Moorgate, Enfield and Edmonton to the leafy suburbs of Hampstead; from the stench of the dissecting room at Guys Hospital to the touristy Isle of Wight; the incessant rain of Teignmouth to the mists of Ben Nevis, plus many more notable Keats places.

Grogan’s strength is her ability to bring the poetry alive with the physical Keats place; this helps to bring it into context. For example, she gives an account of how Keats’s famous Ode to a Nightingale came into being, written in the early spring of 1819, from the peaceful tranquillity of the garden of Wentworth Place, now Keats House. She skilfully draws your attention to the third stanza, in the context of the death of Keats’s younger brother Tom, who had died from consumption only a few months previously aged just nineteen. It is worth repeating:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Towards the end of Keats’s ‘Living Year’ he writes his last great ode To Autumn in Winchester—again the author lays down the background of both Keats’s spirit and mindfulness at this time, and how the poem apparently just ‘happened’ on one fine September day in 1819. She explains the current critical debate about the poem’s meaning—is it a straightforward pastoral poem dealing with the changing of the seasons and nature’s bounty, or alternatively is the poem subliminally charged with an undercurrent of political discord. Both are discussed. On balance she sides with the former, rather than the latter interpretation, as do I.

At the end, all roads lead to Rome, and this is where the author takes us. To Keats’s coffin-like room at 26 Piazza di Spagna overlooking the Spanish Steps, and onwards to his final resting place at what was then called the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. It is fitting, I think, that Suzie Grogan closes this chapter with the thought that Keats might have been much more contented at the end of his life, if he had stayed in England, and died a peaceful death surrounded by those he loved. Again, I concur.

Towards the end of the book there are appendices which include an introduction to some of the people in ‘the Keats circle’, plus a very handy timeline chronicling key dates in the life of John Keats, together with the author’s selection of some of her favourite Keats poems. For the uninitiated, who want to know more about the poet, the book, whilst written from the author’s own personal perspective, is a worthy as well as highly readable introduction to John Keats. It may just spark the flame for others as Posthumous Keats did for me.

John Keats: Poetry, Life & Landscapes is published by Pen and Sword on  30 March 2021. Original cover artwork by Amanda White (www.amandawhite-contemporarynaiveart.com)

www.suziegrogan.co.uk

Ian Reynolds is a retired mechanical engineer who lives in Oxfordshire. He has a personal interest in those associated with the Keats-Shelley Circle, and poets of the Romantic period, especially John Keats. He is unaffiliated.  Ian’s other interests include reading, listening to music, particularly rock and jazz, road cycling and wine.