Portrait of the Artist

PORTRAITS OF KEATS (189 pp.) -Don-ald Parson -World ($ 10).

JOHN KEATS, THE LIVING YEAR (247 pp.)Robert Gitfings -Harvard University [$3.50]

Ah happy happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new . . . -Ode on a Grecian Urn

John Keats died in 1821, aged 25. but the poems he left behind have kept readers and scholars piping happily ever since. So far in 1954, there have already been two new contributions to the long shelf of books about him, both by poets.

Maine's Donald Parson has taken up the question of just what Keats looked like. According to his contemporaries, he was just over 5 ft. tall, well-proportioned, with a face, as his friend Leigh Hunt put it, "in which energy and sensibility were remarkably mixed up." None of Keats's portraitists, however, could quite agree on how the energy and sensibility should be depicted. Some sincerely meant likenesses looked as caricaturish as the unflattering version by one of Keats's London acquaintances, the aging poet-artist, William Blake, who wrote, after making it:

This sketch of Keats This wondrous boy - Today I made the flowing joy - Expression mild he gives delight To one like me of failing light - Long may he live for Beauty's sake - Is the wish of W. Blake.

Although the Lawrence School portrait, of doubtful authorship, fairly approximates the features of Keats's death mask, the most famous studies are those by Keats's great friend, Artist Joseph Severn. Severn nursed Keats through his last illness. His faithfulness to the dying poet, in fact, made him a big name in the art world, and his paintings sold like hot cakes for 20 years afterward.

Briton Robert Gittings' contribution to the Keats shelf is a lively study of Keats through the year that began Sept. 21, 1818 -"the most amazingly creative year that any English poet has achieved." Within that year Keats turned out, among other poems, The Eve of St. Agnes, La Belle Dame sans Merci, the Ode to Autumn, the Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on a Grecian Urn.

What made this year so productive?

Poet Gittings suggests that it was Keats's faculty for translating into poetry all the stormy feelings of a trying period. Within this time his brother died of tuberculosis, and Keats began his painfully soul-searching love affair with Fanny Brawne, the girl who lived next door in Hampstead.

Another prime source of inspiration, says Gittings, is often overlooked. This was the strikingly beautiful Mrs. Isabella Jones, already the companion of a wealthy, middle-aged man named O'Callaghan. While Keats was beginning shy pleasantries with Fanny Brawne in Hampstead, he was also conducting a more full-bodied relationship with Mrs. Jones at her house in Gloucester Street -"a very tasty sort of place," Keats called it, "with Books, Pictures, a bronze statue of Buonaparte, Music, aeolian Harp; a Parrot, a Linnet, a Case of choice Liquers . . ."

The inspiration for at least part of The Eve of St. Agnes, says Gittings, may have come from the earlier set of lyrics in which Keats memorialized his concurrent practices of visiting Mrs. Jones and avoiding O'Callaghan:

Hush hush! tread softly! hush hush, my dear! All the house is asleep, but we know very wel That the jealous, the jealous old baldpate may hear, Tho' you've padded his night-cap -O sweet Isabel . . .

By the end of the year, Keats's dalliance with Mrs. Jones had been overmastered by his jealous love for Fanny Brawne. But shortly afterwards, the worsening of his tubercular condition put him beyond the reach of both.

On Feb. 23, 1821, Keats died in Rome, in the arms of his old friend Joseph Severn. Both Fanny and Isabella, each in her way, were desolate. Painter Severn, although grief-stricken, managed to turn out a deathbed image of Keats that became the talk of Europe.

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