The Walking Tour of Scotland, 1818: The Play of Poetic Forms

Abstract

We tend to characterize Keats’s summer 1818 walking tour to Scotland with Charles Brown as a transition. Given readers’ inclinations to map a complete life onto his 25 meager years, they and we have stamped youth, optimism, mawkishness, and ‘Leigh Hunt’ onto what came before Scotland, and maturity, experience, complexity, ‘Dante,’ and death onto what happened after. The walking tour North — its strangeness, physical testing and hardship, bad weather, and absorption into the orbit of Robert Burns, a poet dead too soon and a sacrifice of his life to his art — is said to have increased the tensile strength of Keats’s poetry and his being. After all, Hyperion, The Eve of St. Agnes, ‘La Belle Dame,’ and the Odes came in the wake of this trip. To a degree Keats wanted this: Scotland should give him new images for poetry. But also the tour became defined under the category of Death — his brother Tom’s sure decline from before the tour to his death on 1 December 1818, and Keats’s own sinister sore throat ‘which came of bog trotting in the island of Mull.’ As a transition, as an event of life that exists less in the present and more in the before and after, as a time that produced no ‘great’ poems, therefore, the tour lacks its own substance; at most it’s a ‘dream of cold beauty,’ more evident in its after-effects: brilliant, ‘mature’ poetry, passionate love, and death. The great value of Carol Kyros Walker’s book is that it frames the tour, making one notice it for itself.

This chapter is my review of Carol Kyros Walker’s Walking North with Keats (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992) which was originally published in The Wordsworth Circle (Autumn 1992) and which I have slightly expanded for this book.