The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (31 page)

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 astonishment, 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.