The Great Work of Your Life

by Stephen Cope

  For several years, Keats wrestled intensely with his doubt. His choice was between a mainstream career—with its imagined security, money, and position—and the never-really-acceptable life of the poet. He saw clearly enough that to be a poet is to live on the edge. No security in that life.

  By his eighteenth year, Keats had worked through much of his ambivalence: He resolved to become a poet. His desire first showed itself as a burning ambition. He wanted to be, as he said, among the first of the English poets. His ambition at this time was so great that he reportedly told his brothers that if he did not succeed he would kill himself. Keats told his friend Henry Stephens that poetry was “the only thing worthy of the attention of superior minds,” and that to rank among the poets was the chief object of his ambition. He threw himself into poetry with the energy almost of despair.

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  Sometime in 1816, when he was about twenty years old, Keats began to intentionally take on the look of the poet. He appeared with his neck nearly bare, like the then-fashionable poet Lord Byron. He took to wearing loose trousers like a sailor’s and a short seaman’s jacket (also Byronic). He let his own thick curls grow long, and experimented with a series of mustaches. Keats was posing as a poet. This is what we do in the early stages of finding our dharma. We try it on. As W. H. Auden noted, “human beings are by nature actors who cannot become something until they have first pretended to be it.”

  Keats was on fire with his dharma. “I find that I cannot exist without Poetry,” he said. “Half the day will not do.” His early enthusiasm for dharma is expressed in a long, rambling, and ecstatic poem called “Sleep and Poetry.” One night, after a languorous dinner party during which the talk was of nothing but poetry, Keats was too excited to sleep. Lying in bed, he had a waking dream of his own destiny. His vision expanded to a vision of his own future as a poet—and not only that, but to the past of English poetry and his intersection with it. He allowed himself to feel his kinship with Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton.

  This turned out to be a pivotal moment in Keats’s dharma story. It marked his discovery of his own artistic lineage—and most important, his connection with William Shakespeare. Just as one cannot really understand Mark without understanding Keats, one cannot understand Keats without knowing Shakespeare. From the days of his romps with Charles Cowden Clarke, Keats had been devoted to the Bard, but now his interest and affinity deepened. He put up a picture of Shakespeare over his writing desk, and it would remain there for the rest of his life. He now found new meaning in line after line of Shakespeare. He reread the plays and the sonnets. He copied out the sonnets and emulated them in his own writing.

  This move toward Shakespeare is central in Keats’s dharma story. Every one of us who takes his dharma seriously will search for exemplars. On fire with our own dharma, we sniff out others who are working in the same dharma gold mine as we. Jane Goodall sniffed it out in Louis Leakey, her famous mentor. Susan B. Anthony in Charlotte Brontë, whose pictures, as I have said, hung over her bureau until her death. Beethoven, as we will see, found it in Bach.

  What role do these exemplars play? We see in them the full expression of a kindred dharma. We see in them the full flower of what we know exists as a seed within our own self. These exemplars become essential doorways for us into our own dharma. They become transitional objects. We read them, study them, take them apart and put them back together again, just as Keats did with Shakespeare. We ingest them. And eventually, through them, we are awakened to our own idiosyncratic genius, just as Arjuna is eventually awakened to his dharma through his relationship with his exemplar, Krishna.

  We cannot really understand another human being without understanding his dharma story. And we cannot understand his dharma story without grasping the importance of his dharma mentors. The more I dug into Keats, the more I discovered that one cannot understand Keats without understanding Shakespeare. Mark apparently discovered the same thing. His second major play would be about Shakespeare.

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  Keats’s desire to express himself—fueled by his increasing identification with Shakespeare—was now at the flood. It was at this moment that he declared: “O for ten years, that I may overwhelm Myself in poesy;” He feared, of course, that his life would not be long enough to realize his “genius.” Remember his history: His father died at thirty, his mother at thirty-six. From his point of view, even a decade seemed a lot to ask.

  But Keats now took the next necessary step. He dove headlong into the phase of mastery that we have called deliberate practice. His early writing was mediocre. But he discovered that if he persevered, every now and then some truly fine poetry would emerge. It did not come easily. But he found within himself a quality of strong determination that allowed him to persevere. He worked hard. He wrote daily—as he said, always groping for the noble chiseled line.

  Keats now entered into his famous competition with English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, his rival and peer, who had already begun to make a name for himself in poetic circles. Shelley challenged both Keats and himself to write a long narrative poem—of 4,000 lines. The terms of the challenge? The poem must be completed in six months—a formidable task for a young and untried poet.

  When Keats decided to commit himself to Shelley’s challenge, he had no idea whether he could actually accomplish such a deed. But he decided to bring everything he had to the task. This was his first taste of true “unity in action.” He would organize all of his energies in the service of this challenge. In the face of this undertaking, he finally and completely gave up medicine. He did not take the final exam for his apothecary license. This was a key moment, because Keats showed that he was willing to risk failure. He was willing to let his dreams of glory die, and actually take on the work—to succeed, or as he said, to be exposed as a fraud.

  He realized that there was no way to discover whether he could write a long poem but to try. “I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest,” he said. This moment marked the beginning of a shift in Keats’s views about fame. He began to see its deleterious effects. “There is no greater sin after the seven deadly than to flatter oneself into an idea of being a great Poet,” he wrote to his brother. He realized what he would later call the folly of self-congratulations and lusting after fame—the folly of his early fascination with the laurel crowning.

  Keats now headed off to the Isle of Wight, so that he could work uninterruptedly. He spent at least eight hours a day reading and writing. During this period he became for the first time a truly disciplined writer. And he began to examine his writing process—his own motivations and the ecology of his work and energy. He looked critically at his own output. He was writing massive amounts of poetry. But was it good? At one point, during a period of three weeks he wrote well over a thousand lines of poetry, without flagging. And yet, he was not satisfied with the work. He saw that he was writing in the spirit of cramming. In the spirit of greed. “A clenched fist was at work,” he said.

  Keats mentions this insight in a letter to his brother George. “The high idea I have of poetical fame makes me think I see it towering too high above me.” He compared it to an attempt to scale the White Cliffs of Dover, and called it “the Cliff of Poesy.” He slowly began to see how his own longing and craving for success may have been undermining the quality of his work. Certainly, he saw how his craving for fame and “laurels” created a kind of anxiety that infected his work. (“Those who are motivated only by the fruits of action,” teaches Krishna, “are miserable!” Miserable! “They are constantly anxious about the results of what they do.”)

  Keats, in a brilliant intuitive move, now attempted to work out the problem of grasping through the protagonist of the poem he was writing. He has his main character—Endymion—face the challenge of failure in his quest. And how does Endymion work it out? He enters what Keats called “the Cave of Quietude,” a retreat into the depths of consciousness. In quiet retreat and contemplation, Endymion rea
lizes that success and failure are not the measure of life. He sees the way in which both light and shade, success and failure, and praise and blame, are all parts of life. He sees, even, the ways in which beauty can be revealed through sorrow, and through life’s losses. He decides to choose complete surrender to the endless richness of the moment, whatever the moment brings. He decides to embrace both sides of life—the light and the shadow. This was a pivotal moment in the development of Keats’s creative consciousness.

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  Keats finished Endymion at the age of twenty-one, on November 28, 1817. It was a triumph for the young poet. Not because it was a great poem. It was not. But because of what it had taught him. Keats would later say, famously, that life is the “vale of Soul-making” and his experience of Endymion was a soul-maker for him. Endymion made Keats a poet, for he realized that real fulfillment was not about the approbation of critics, but rather came naturally through the experience of bringing forth the best that was in him. It was not the poem’s success or failure in the eyes of others that created fulfillment for the poet.

  Endymion—this one poem—represents almost half of the poetry Keats published in his short lifetime. Its writing occupied him through nearly one-quarter of his poetic career. And it was not, as I have said, an outward success. But it was an inward success. He realized that his having written it mattered more than what he had written. It was the process of bringing everything he had to the table that transformed him.

  In the process of his deliberate practice, Keats had had moments of exhilaration. At regular moments during his work, he had experienced a surrender to some greater power. He would later say, “That which is creative must create itself.” He discovered, as all great artists do, that there was something impersonal at work. Something at work that was not him. And to surrender to this larger force gave him a new kind of freedom, and a new sense of faith in the process itself.

  He realized (just as Krishna taught Arjuna) that he was not the Doer. That which is creative must create itself. Mastery of his art required humility and a capacity for surrender—a receptivity to experience, and to sorrow as well as joy. Having tasted this himself, he saw that this was the very essence of Shakespeare’s greatness. (And after Endymion his sense of oneness with Shakespeare increased.) He saw that the “immortality” that is gained in the creation of great art is not immortality in anyone else’s eyes, but a transcendence of time through the outpouring of the soul’s possibility. Indeed, he discovered, as did Shakespeare, that throwing oneself passionately into work brings a changed relationship with time. This was true immortality.

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  With this came a first glimpse, for Keats, of a sublime truth. He realized that the most precious fruit of his art would be the way it allowed him access to the innermost character of a person or thing. He saw that poetry was merely a vehicle—a way to know the world. A way to know the soul of a person, a landscape, or any object of beauty. He realized that he did not need to possess any of it. He only needed to know it. And this knowing was what brought not just happiness, but bliss, rapture, and authentic fulfillment.

  The question he had been asking—“Wherein lies happiness?”—now had its best answer. “A fellowship with essence!!!” he would exclaim. With this insight, Keats had solved the central riddle of his life: how to have a full experience of life without possessing it—without owning it, without grasping it, without holding on to it.

  Hard upon the heels of this discovery came another: Grasping for an object actually interferes with knowing it. The discovery that holding on too tightly disturbs the mind, and finally interferes with the mind’s capacity to know. This is, of course, the very insight that Krishna teaches to Arjuna.

  And so emerged the insight for which Keats is best known by generations of college students: his theory of Negative Capability. He had this remarkable insight on a walk—his favorite time for reflecting—and wrote it down later in a letter to his brother: “Several things dovetailed in my mind,” he wrote excitedly to his brother George, “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 man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” This Negative Capability also seems to require the capacity for surrender, and the capacity, as Keats said, to “annul the self.”

  Keats found these insights exhilarating—freeing. “Let us open our leaves like a flower and be passive and receptive—sap will be given us for Meat and dew for drink—I was led into these thoughts … by the beauty of the morning operating on a sense of Idleness …”

  Keats’s poetic consciousness now began to move beyond what the contemplative traditions often call the pairs of opposites: gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and ill-repute. He saw how the poet must be open to all experience, light and dark. He saw the importance of leisure, as Frost did. And he began to learn to wait patiently for a gradual ripening.

  Observes Aileen Ward: “A year or two earlier he had described the writing of poetry in terms of a journey, a battle, a cliff to be scaled. Now he saw it in images of grain ripening, of wine aging, of the sun rising and setting, the flower which must drink the nature of the soil before it can put forth its blossoming.”

  Keats now began to formulate his description of the greatest poetic virtue—what he would come to call “disinterestedness.” “To bear all naked truths, and to envisage circumstance, all calm,” he wrote in “Hyperion.” “That is the top of sovereignty.” Keats had rediscovered the soul of Krishna’s teaching.

  In his attempt to put all of this into words, John Keats wrote two sonnets on fame. In the first, he states that fame comes only to the man who has learned to be indifferent to it. In the second, he calls fame “a fierce miscreed” of salvation, and he turns away from his earlier feverish grasping for success toward less aggressive images of unforced growth—toward the gradual unfolding of life that he now perceives to be in the natural order of things. He begins to use images of ripening. “If Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree,” he wrote, “it had better not come at all.”

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  Now Keats’s most mature poetry pours forth. This outpouring must remind us of Thoreau at Walden, after he let go of his grasping for fame and success. Keats, quite aware of his own transformation, writes about it with uncharacteristic understatement: “I think a little change has taken place in my intellect lately.”

  Keats declared that he would henceforth write “not for Fame and Laurel, but from the mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful even if my night’s labours should be burnt every morning and no eye ever shine upon them.” Ward captures the moment perfectly: “Being a poet, he now realized, was no glorious thing in itself but merely a fact of his own nature. What alone mattered was the activity of writing, the kingdom of his own creation which he entered every time he sat down to work. Beside this solitary delight the world’s applause or contempt meant nothing.”

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  This far into Keats’s story, I was stunned by the growing realization that even as an undergraduate Mark Stevenson had fully understood the meaning of Keats’s transformation. I remembered, in fact, that Mark had struggled to communicate all of this to me—in those long talks on Memorial Hill, and later as we walked in the woods near my house in Boston. He had tried to tell me about Negative Capability. He had tried to tell me how strangely close he felt to Keats—and later to Shakespeare.

  He had tried to tell me how he felt a call to communicate Keats’s truth to the current generation, and how lonely it was to have a vocation so few understood or valued.

  As I gazed at Mark’s picture over my writing desk one morning—with all of these thoughts swirling—I had an idea: Call his mother. Call Dorothy! I hadn’t spoken with her since he died—sixteen years earlier. I dialed the number in my old address book. To my astoni
shment, she picked up the phone. There she was! She must be well into her eighties, I thought. But she sounded well, and completely on top of things as always.

  Dorothy caught me up: Her husband, Robert, had died. She had sold the family home and now lived in an assisted-care community. We talked about Mark. About his play. About his last, difficult year. I told her about the book I was writing, about my rediscovery of the meaning of Mark’s work, and about the Bhagavad Gita.

  I asked Dorothy if she had a copy of the manuscript of This Living Hand.

  “Yes! I’m pretty sure I’ve got it packed away somewhere. I’ll find it for you.”

  A week later, there it was on my doorstep with the mail. It was the original manuscript of This Living Hand, typed out on a manual typewriter in the early 1970s, with copious cross-outs and notes written in Mark’s elegant hand. It all came rushing back.

  Dorothy gave me the phone number of her eldest surviving son, John, and I called him as well. We talked at length about Mark. What was Mark’s relationship to Keats? What about this old notion that Mark was a reincarnation of Keats? John had clearly thought about these issues.

  “We often spoke about his feelings regarding this possibility [of reincarnation],” John wrote to me after our chat. “I do remember a distinct time when he wrestled with this notion, a restless period that ended with his acceptance of what he called ‘the spirit of Keats.’ This point is supported by two clear examples from Mark’s life. First, he told me of his experiences in feeling—and once seeing—Keats’s spirit at his house in England and also at his grave in Rome. Neither experience frightened Mark, but rather gave him a sense of calm and joy to be alive and carrying out his dreams of finishing the play and working to improve each scene—much like Keats’s own dedication to his poetry. In either case, what happened to Mark was much more than an inspiring moment; I think these occurrences had a lasting effect, and became part of the mysticism of Mark’s life forward. He was never afraid of these experiences; they gave him comfort, like meeting up with a long-lost friend who returned for a brief visit.”