John Keats (1795-1821) 

John Keats had as much sensitivity toward the natural world as any author of the period. From his earliest lyrical fragments and letters to the great odes of 1819, his writing incorporated an astonishing number of natural images as well as countless descriptions of animals and plants. Keats studied medicine before he turned to poetry, and his language often reflects keen scientific awareness and an almost clinical observational skill. His medical studies inform his poetry in complex and important ways. He can also indicate an awareness of the natural discoveries of his own era, as in his description--in Endymion (1817)--of fossils littering the seabed: 
         skeletons of man,
Of beast, behemoth, and leviathan,
And elephant, and eagle, and huge jaw
Of nameless monster.   (III, 133-36)
Keats's poetic powers of observation are remarkable not only for their accuracy and intensity but for their ability to link human activity with the wider animate world:

I go among the Fields and catch a glimpse of a stoat or a fieldmouse peeping out of the withered grass--the creature hath a purpose and its eyes are bright with it--I go amongst the buildings of a city and I see a Man hurrying along --to what? The creature hath a purpose and his eyes are bright with it.
(Letters 2:80)

Keats's poems and letters reveal a constant attraction and attention to the details of his natural surroundings. From his earliest lyrics ("Imitation of Spenser," 1814):

          There the king-fisher saw his plumage bright
          Vying with fish of brilliant dye below,
          Whose silken fins and golden scalës' light
          Cast upward, through the waves, a ruby glow.

Through the Shakespearean cadences of "Ode to a Nightingale":

          The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild--
               White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
                   Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves;
                          And mid-May's eldest child,
               The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
                   The murmurous haunts of flies on summer eves.

To the naturalistic richness of "To Autumn":

          Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
              Among the river sallows, borne aloft
                   Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
          And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
              Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
              The red-breast whistles from a garden croft;
                   And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Keats seems almost preternaturally aware of the forces within nature, the otherness of the natural world, and the paradoxical links between human sensibility and naturalistic sensations in all animals, human and otherwise. He can sometimes treat plants with an almost Renaissance delicacy, criticized by those--like Byron--who sought more vigorous representations of the natural world; but Keats can then snap back with an image--"How beautiful the season is now--How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it . . . I never lik'd the stubble fields so much as now--Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow a stubble plain looks warm--in the same way that some pictures look warm--this struck me so much in my [S]unday's walk that I composed upon it" (letter to Reynolds, 21 September 1819), describing the genesis of "To Autumn"--that makes any critical comment seem almost superfluous.

Keats links:

Natural history in Keats's letters (excerpts)

Keats on the natural world (poetry excerpts)

"On the Grasshopper and Cricket" ("The poetry of the earth is never dead")


 

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