John Keats's Self-Caricature

Let there be no more talk of major and minor. We have had enough of the Great in the Great Odes. Ours is a Naughty Keats. How many more articles must we read on the importance and significance of Great Keats? The whole of the critical tradition on Beautiful Keats can be reduced to this brilliant insight, “He is with Shakespeare.” Very well, we understand. Now we ask that not one sentence of criticism be written on the Odes or the Hyperions or “this living hand” for at least half a century. We must forget Tragic Keats long enough to get to know Keats, the Scribbler. Ours is a Playful Keats. As critics, let us learn from the poet and read his work in the spirit of Outlawry. Our research question—how two or three dove’s eggs can hatch into sonnets.

The above piece was written by an idealistic graduate student with hopes of rescuing John Keats from the gentle embraces of the Cult of the Beautiful. At least that is the persona and attitude I adopted when writing it as part of a collaborative manifesto, nothing more than an exercise by a group of PhD students who also happened to write poetry. What I learned from writing my manifiestito is that I’m just not cut out to write in the polemical mode. Rereading it I feel not a little embarrassed. Fortunately for me, the manifesto never manifested.
What concerned me then and continues to concern me is our investment in the “sublime tragedy” of Keats’s life. In the narrative we construct of his poetic development, the poetical is conflated into the biographical. Jack Stillinger—in the Introduction to what has become the standard edition of Keats’s poems—rehearses this narrative: “Keats at one time quietly predicted that he would, after his death, be ‘among the English Poets.’ This edition, as a complete poetical works in chronological order, allows the reader to follow his poem-by-poem progress toward that end.” Keats is in a race to reach his end, or goal, of achieving poetic masterpieces before he reaches the end of his life. Elizabeth Cook, the editor of the Oxford John Keats, which is also ordered biographically, not only shares in the narrative but also expresses it in an even more striking manner: “It is as if his cells had intimation of the tuberculosis that was to kill him and his whole organism accelerated its work in response.” This narrative reduces Keats to the “Great Odes.”
I thought that one way to counteract this reduction would be to focus attention on those poems that do not fit into the narrative of Keats’s poetic development, which has a whole lot to do with the supposed maturity of the ode sequence. I principally had the following poem in mind.
There was a naughty boy,
A naughty boy was he,
He would not stop at home,
He could not quiet be-
He took
In his knapsack
A book
Full of vowels
And a shirt
With some towels,
A slight cap
For night cap,
A hair brush,
Comb ditto,
New stockings
For old ones
Would split O!
This knapsack
Tight at's back
He rivetted close
And followed his nose
To the north,
To the north,
And follow'd his nose
To the north.
There was a naughty boy
And a naughty boy was he,
For nothing would he do
But scribble poetry-
He took
An ink stand
In his hand
And a pen
Big as ten
In the other,
And away
In a pother
He ran
And fountains
And ghostes
And postes
And witches
And ditches
And wrote
In his coat
When the weather
Was cool,
Fear of gout,
And without
When the weather
Was warm-
Och the charm
When we choose
To follow one's nose
To the north,
To the north,
To follow one's nose
To the north!
There was a naughty boy
And a naughty boy was he,
He kept little fishes
In washing tubs three
In spite
Of the might
Of the maid
Nor afraid
Of his Granny-good-
He often would
Hurly burly
Get up early
And go
By hook or crook
To the brook
And bring home
Miller's thumb,
Tittlebat
Not over fat,
Minnows small
As the stall
Of a glove,
Not above
The size
Of a nice
Little baby's
Little fingers-
O he made
'Twas his trade
Of fish a pretty kettle
A kettle-
A kettle
Of fish a pretty kettle
A kettle!
There was a naughty boy,
And a naughty boy was he,
He ran away to Scotland
The people for to see-
There he found
That the ground
Was as hard,
That a yard
Was as long,
That a song
Was as merry,
That a cherry
Was as red,
That lead
Was as weighty,
That fourscore
Was as eighty,
That a door
Was as wooden
As in England-
So he stood in his shoes
And he wonder'd,
He wonder'd,
He stood in his
Shoes and he wonder'd.
Keats refers to this poem as a “song about myself.” (Sort of like Whitman if Whitman had the ability not to take himself so seriously.) Keats’s self-caricaturizing gesture presents his playful engagement with the anxiety over being “among the English poets.” The naughty boy doesn’t write masterpieces; he scribbles. The naughty boy’s knapsack carries a book full not of poetry but of vowels. Even the naught in “naughty boy” seems to make a caricature of the "poetical character" as described by Keats: “it is not itself—it has no self—it is everything and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys light and shade.” Keats’s japing of his own aspirations is most apparent in the image of “a pen as big as ten.” And this is the image that illustrator Ezra Jack Keats captures so magnificently on the cover of the children’s book, The Naughty Boy: A Poem by John Keats.