KEATS AT OXFORD

Evening Post, Issue 65, 13 September 1924, Page 17

KEATS AT OXFORD

.INFLUENCE OF THE THAMES ONHIS POETRY. The president of Magdalen, Sir Herbert Warren, speaking at All Souls' to the Oxford branch of the English Association, gave several new, or littleknown, details, concerning the short stay of Keats within the walls of the university, in the autumn of 1817, reports, an English exchange. "His father was killed in an accident while Keats was still young, and when he was fourteen his rtiother died, and his guardian took him away and apprenticed him to a country surgeon. A little later he attached himself to the hospital schools in London, but.in'lßl6 he decided to adopt literature as his life's work. He was to enjoy only five years more of life—how short a time. The first of these years of freedom, then, had much importance, and part of the first, the year 1817, some five or six weeks were spent

in Oxford. He lived the life of an undergraduate 'with his friond, Benjamin, Bailey,, in . Magdalen Hall. ' The Ox-' ford' of those days was the old unspoiled, miexpanded Oxford, before the railways, and before the suburbs. It was a. : garden" city, and the country ran right up to its grey walls. Time'and weather were propitious. It was a singularly fine autumn. Keats described his life in his letters, and Bailey, years after, gave a description of the poet himself to his biographer,' Lord Houghton. Like undergraduates they spent the morning in work and the afternoon in walking or on the river; like undergraduates they took their books with, them in their boat and read Wordsworth in a nook they discovered in one pt the side streams. ~ ' . .■ ' ' ' "A French writer himself a poet, by name Angellier, had traced the influence of the Thames on Keats's poetry. What was more certain was that. Bailey gave him new,ideas of the scope and range of poetry, especially impessing upon him the merits of.Wordsworth and Milton and, later, of Dante, and tliis in-, fluence appeared almost at once. "While Keats was the guest of Bailey he wrote the 'greater part of the third book of 'Endymioh,' and in the fourth, liool?, begun directly after he left Ox- : ford, the well-known allusion to the Italian poets appeared. Bailey presented him with a copy of Cary's Dante, and this h'n took with him on his journey to Scotland in 1818; Bailey was reading ..with a view to taking orders, whiah hs shortly afterwards did, and here again his influence could be definitely traced. Years after, writing.from Ceylon, where he had become an archdeacon, he gavo to Lord Houghton the most giaphic and vivid description, perhaps, which remained of Keats. It would seem, too, that he introduced him to Jpremy Taylor, and it was significant that Jeremy Taylor was the author whom his friend Severn read to him when he was on his death bed in Rome.

"Yet another interesting record by Bailey of his friend was to be found in the 'Oxford Herald' of the . tiihfl. Amongst other things lie. recorded the visit to Stratford-on-Avon, "which they mado together, and of which KeaCs spoke in :i jolter -describing somewhat Inter his visit to the cottage of Burns."