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ACROSS HAMPSTEAD HEATH: John Keats, 200 years ago and nearer to me
Today marks the 200th anniversary of John Keats’ death in Rome, in a small flat above the Spanish Steps. It reminded me of something I’d written many years ago, on my very first trip to London. It was December 14, 1972; my friend Blake and I were living in a cold-water room in Muswell Hill, and that day we walked over to Highgate and across Hampstead Heath to visit the house in what is now called Keats Grove where he lodged with his friend Charles Brown at Wentworth House, and where Fanny Brawne was his next-door neighbour. We examined the house, and I bought a postcard of the classic romantic portrait, by John Severn, with his head in his hand, which I have, somewhere, still.
Then we walked back across the Heath, and as we did I thought of Keats’ own walk, back from Highgate and a mummers play, a Christmas pantomime, when, arguing with his friends, he defined the concept of Negative Capability, as he explained to his brothers in a letter a few days later:
“several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”
