"Jane Campion has an amazing Fanny" is a headline you don't come across too often. But this headline in fact heralds significant news for poetry lovers, particularly if Romantic poetry is what butters your parsnips.
The story concerns The Piano director's planned biopic of John Keats, focusing on his love affair with Fanny Brawne. Campion's film will be called Bright Star (after the poem Keats wrote for Ms Brawne) and the "amazing Fanny" in question is Abbie Cornish who will play the love interest.
Keats himself will be portrayed by Ben Whishaw. Whishaw has commented that he didn't know a lot about Keats before auditioning for Campion but he has since mugged up and now knows that Keats was "a beautiful human being and poet". Campion herself has been quoted as saying that Keats was "somebody who had something almost angelic about him". Hang on a minute, I feel a stereotype coming on.
Romantic poets sure have suffered from stereotypes: the super-sensitive swooner stereotype is milked for all it is worth by Mrs Miggins's fainting poets in Blackadder Three.
On this front, Byron put the boot into what he perceived to be Keats's solipsistic sensitivity: "he is always frigging his Imagination... this miserable Self-polluter of the human mind". Later in the 19th century Carlyle mocked Keats, declaring him "a miserable creature, hungering after sweets he can't get... Keats wanted a world of treacle".
Wide of the mark and unfair as these caricatures are, these "miserable" traits of self-obsessed imagination and unembarrassed emoting are now positively lauded in our therapy-fixated culture. If Jane Campion is at all tempted to see Keats through the prism of these current obsessions, my advice is: don't!
However, attempts to resurrect Keats as a radical don't really hit their target either. Andrew Motion claims that Keats "was a dangerously subversive figure". Nice try Andrew, but the facts don't really add up to that. Napoleon Bonaparte could with reason be called a "dangerously subversive figure", but Keats? The French shook the world, while English poets merely watched, albeit with interest. Some early so-so poetry (Keats himself was painfully ambivalent about Endymion) was hardly the siege of Moscow.
Jane Campion has a difficult task ahead of her but not an impossible one. What we really don't want from a Keats biopic is a treacle-fest, a-sopping and a-trembling with beautiful people. Equally insufferable would be a souped-up faux-radical revisioning of Keats as a subversive.
What we could really do with is a biopic of Keats with some grit in it. Despite the jeering of Byron and Carlyle, Keats knew only too well that the physical reality of life in the early 19th century was likely to be short, brutal and nasty. In his classic biography, Robert Gittings describes what confronted Keats as an apprentice surgeon at Guy's Hospital: "It was not only the groans of patients, half-stupefied with rum, or, worse, the cries of the children that could shake one: worst of all was the terrifying lack of skill of some of the surgeons."
It is this blood and guts reality, not treacle, which lies at the heart of Keats' poetry. As Christopher Ricks argued more than 30 years ago in Keats and Embarrassment, Keats's poetry never runs away from the physical but tackles it head on. For Keats, poetry is a deeply humanistic activity that, as it busts through the physical here and now, speaks to and touches individuals across time and place.
In a letter he wrote to his brother and sister-in-law telling them of the death of their beloved brother Tom from tuberculosis, Keats urged them to read a passage of Shakespeare at 10 o'clock every Sunday as he did the same "and we shall be as near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room".
Keats believed poetry was the universal powerhouse of human communication: he wanted to be part of it and possessed the arrogance to attempt it. In a letter to Benjamin Robert Haydon he asked, "I remember you saying that you had notions of a good Genius presiding over you - I have of late had the same thought...Is it too daring to fancy Shakespeare this presider?"
Let us stop, marvel at and give thanks for this arrogance. It was this arrogance that drove Keats to attempt the epic Endymion, uneducated nobody that he was. Today such autodidactic arrogance would be laughed out of the learning and skills centre. Keats was no angel. He was in fact an arrogant little shit. Oh please Jane, give us this Keats.
