The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (30 page)

Keats was, like most of us—like Arjuna—full of doubt about the viability of his dharma. Throughout his teens, he was almost constantly involved in an inner struggle around his identity. In an attempt to develop a practical career, he apprenticed to an apothecary, determined to move toward the medical profession. He felt keenly the need to make his way in the world. He was bright enough to succeed in medicine. And he was determined to do some good for the world. Early on in his apprenticeship, indeed, he did rise to the top of the field, and he was given prized positions among his peers.

But from the start, Keats was conflicted about medicine. In fact, this doctor in training was sickened by the very sight of illness. He had never recovered from seeing his mother’s slow death from tuberculosis. As a result, he overidentified with his patients and their suffering. He likely would have been a very unhappy physician.

With the discovery of poetry, Keats’s interest in medicine began to wane. He cut classes. And when he did go to class, he sat absorbed in the working out of a poetic image or the structure of a sonnet. Some of his classmates later described him as lazy, as indolent—and as a dreamer. They had no idea what he was working out in his notebooks.

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 realizes 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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