KEATS GOES TO OXFORD

Evening Star, Issue 18717, 20 August 1924, Page 5

KEATS GOES TO OXFORD

SOME LITTLE-KNOWN DETAILS. The president of Magdalen, Sir Herbert Van-on, speaking at All Souls’ to the Uford branch of the English Association, ;:;ve several new, or little-known, details concerning the short stay of Keats within the walls of the University in the autumn of 1817. “ His father was killed in an accident while Keats was still young, and when he was fourteen his mother died, and his guardian took him away and apprenticed him to a country surgeon. A little later he attached himself to tire hospital schools in London, but in 1816 ho decided to adopt literature as his life’s work. “ Ho 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 tho first, the year 1817, some live or six weeks_ were spent in Oxford. He lived tho life of an undergraduate with his friend. Benjamin Bailey, in Magdalen Hall. The Oxford of those days was the old unspoiled, unexpanded Oxford, before the railways and before the suburbs. It was a garden city, and tho country ran right up to its grey walls. “ Time and weather were propitious. It was a singularly Urn; autumn. Keats described ins 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 tho afternoon in walking or on tho river; like undergraduates they took their books with them in their boat, and read Wordsworth in a nook they discovered in one of the side streams.

“ A French writer, himself a poet, by mime Angcllier, had traced tho influence of the Thames on Keats’s poetry. What was more certain was that E<yi(y gave him now ideas of the scope and range of poetry, especially impressing upon him the merits of Wordsworth and Milton, and, later, of Dante, and this influence appeared almost at once. “ While Keats was the guest of Bailey ho wrote the greater part of the third book of Endymion, and in tho fourth book, begun directly after ho left Oxford, the well-known allusion to the Italian poets appeared. Bailey presented him with a, copy of Cary’s ‘ Dante,' and this lie took with him on his journey to Scotland in 1818.

“ Bailey was reading with a view to taking orders, which ho shortly afterwards did, and here .again his influence could be definitely traced. Years after, writing from Ceylon, where he had become an archdeacon, he gave to Lord Houghton the most graphic and vivid description, perhaps, which remained of Keats. It would seem, too, that he introduced him to Jeremy 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 m tho 4 Oxford Herald ’ of the time. Amongst other things he recorded tho visit to Stratford-on-Avon which they made together, and of which Iveats spoke in a letter describing somewhat later his visit to the cottage of Burns.”- 1