In the Mouth of Fame

THE SELECTED LETTERS OF JOHN KEATS (282 pp.)--Edited by Lionel Trilling--Farrar, Straus & Young ($3.50).

Keats's letters are among the best in the language; they move toward a poignant climax as the young poet, his powers barely glimpsed, realizes that he will die young (tuberculosis killed him at the age of 25). That Keats was a full-blooded man as well as a literary genius is the main impression left by this collection, for which Lionel Trilling (The Middle of the Journey; The Liberal Imagination) has written a sparkling introduction.

As a schoolboy, John Keats was handy with his fists. One of his friends later recalled that "he would fight anyone--morning, noon and night, his brothers among the rest." Nothing in the boy suggested the conceit of the prodigy, and when he began writing verse a few years later, he assumed none of the pale, bohemian attitudes of the precious poet.

Hatter or Poet? Keats never had things easy. His father, a stableman, died when Keats was nine, and his mother remarried, unhappily. The boy's guardian was a stern merchant who mistrusted poetry on principle, and thought John would be better off as a hatter.

But Keats's charm and talent captivated the livelier literary people of his day. The letters written in his early 20s reflect the hope of his friends for his talent and the joyous confidence with which he shared their hope. "What a thing," he exclaims, "to be in the Mouth of Fame." And in another letter he bursts out: "I feel assured I should write from the mere yearning and fondness I have for the Beautiful even if my night's labours should be burnt every morning . . ."

This hunger for poetic expression was part of a larger hunger for all of human experience. Keats was frankly sensuous: "Talking of Pleasure," he writes to a friend, "this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine--good god how fine. It went down soft, slushy, oozy." This Keats, who loved food, pretty girls and hiking, does not match the stereotype of the romantic poet; he is far closer to Bernard Shaw's description of him as "a merry soul, a jolly fellow, who could not only carry his splendid burthen of genius, but swing it around, toss it up and catch it again, and whistle a tune as he strode along."

Matter of the Moment. These letters destroy two other romantic legends that have grown up about Keats. One is that he died from the pain caused by the vicious reviews the British literary magazines gave his early poem Endymion. The Keats revealed here was much too hardy to let a few brutal words break him. He wrote: "This is a mere matter of the moment--I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death."

The other legend is that the sweetheart of his dying.months, Fanny Brawne, was a coldhearted flirt who did not return his love. Keats's letters to Fanny are desperate with yearning for life, bitterness of the foreknowledge of death, and an unashamed sexual longing. They make clear, however, that the relation between the two was a tragedy of mutual love broken by hard circumstance. Tender, cajoling, jealous, despairing and frantic by turn, these last letters are like the cry of a doomed soul: "You must be mine to die upon the rack if I want you . . . No--my sweet Fanny--I am wrong. I do not want you to be unhappy--and yet I do, I must while there is so sweet a Beauty--my loveliest my darling! Good bye! I Kill you--0 the torments!"

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