• 1  H. E. Rollins (ed.), The Letters of John Keats: 1814–1821, 2 vols, Cambridge, MA., Harvard Univers (...)

We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the Author.
Keats’s letter to Reynolds, 3 May 1818.1

• 2  Letter from J. Keats to T. Keats, 2 July 1818, in ibid., I, p. 309.

1When reflecting on the art of Keats and Burns, it seemed only natural that the differences would prevail over the similarities but a closer look at their parallel lives and philosophies of creation reveals two poets who are actually walking on common grounds. Despite an obvious discrepancy in birth (one of Scottish extraction, the other a Londoner) and chronology (Burns died just a year after Keats was born), they both seemed to share the essentials and meet around a trinity of talents: a sound knowledge of the medical body, a strong sense of wit and humor, a passion for food and a good glass of “whuskey”. Turning west from Dumfries to the coast, Keats writes to his brother Tom in July 1818: “We have now begun upon whiskey—called here whuskey very smart stuff it is—Mixed like our liquors with sugar & water tis called toddy, very pretty drink & much praised by Burns”.2 And on his gargantuesque appetite that not even the Highland excesses could pretend to match, he wrote to Fanny just a month later:

• 4  R. Burns, “Tam O’Shanter”, in T. Burke (ed.), The Collected Poems of Robert Burns,London, Wordswor (...)

2Like Keats, Burns had mixed feelings regarding the sources of his French inheritance. Both authors are indeed heirs to Rabelais’s “carnivalesque” tradition, its eccentricity and physicality, its earthly attachments, its anatomical patterns and, to paraphrase Bakhtin, its sense of both comic and cosmic relief. Although Burns displays a strong set of influences, he shows no remorse in the way his poetry despises French cuisine (we remember the panache and gusto with which he criticizes the “French ragout” in To A Haggis) and sneers at France’s affected modes of dancing: “nae cotillon brent new frae France”,4 he writes in Tam O’Shanter. That same reference is mentioned by Keats in his letter to Tom, when he was “kicking and twirling” to the “Highland fling” on June 30th, in the market town of Ireby:

• 6  R. Burns, “Epistle to John Lapraik, an Old Scottish Bard”, in T. Burke (ed.), The Collected Poems (...)
• 7  J. Keats, “So many bards gild the lapses of time!”, in J. Stillinger (ed.), John Keats: The Comple (...)

3 Whether we address the question of Keats’s or Burns’s artistic growth, the double portrait of the artists, if faithful, shows recurring features. When respectively looking at several pieces of biographical criticisms, Burns and Keats stand out as the two voices of “uneducated genius”. Had Burns lived another twenty years, he would have defended the targeted “Cockney poet” against the attacks of contemporary reviewers with those words: “Gie me ae spark o’ Nature’s fire, / That’s a’ the learning I desire; / Then tho’ I drudge thro’ dub an’ mire / At pleugh or cart, / My Muse, tho’ hamely in attire, / May touch the heart” (v. 73–78).6 In line with the works of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson, Burns, feigning a naïve form of ignorance, celebrates modesty as the only path to authority. And Keats would not have it any other way: “How many bards gild the lapses of time! […] And often, when I sit me down to rhyme, / These will in throngs before my mind intrude: / But no confusion, no disturbance rude / Do they occasion; ’tis a pleasing chime”.7 No “anxiety of influence” there, no sense of occasion: just plain reverence in the form of a sweet melody.

• 8  Letter from J. Keats to R. Woodhouse, 27 October 1818, in H. E. Rollins (ed.), The Letters of John (...)
• 9  Letter from J. Keats to B. R. Haydon, 8 April 1818, in ibid., I, p. 264.
• 10  Letter from J. Keats to B. Bailey, 22 July 1818, in H. E. Rollins (ed.), The Letters of John Keats (...)
• 11  J. Keats, “How many bards gild the lapses of time”, in J. Stillinger (ed.), John Keats: The Comple (...)

4On that same note, another counterpoint comes to mind. When reading the literature on Burns, the Keatsian expression “chameleon poet”, the most “unpoetical”8 poet of all, free to assume any facet of Nature’s identity, also seems to appear once or twice. There again, such adjectives as sensuous, anamorphic, extravagant would likely fit both their poetic selves—as would provocative and bawdy, in the grand eighteenth century tradition of Swift or Smollett whom Keats admired just as much as Burns, mixing body and soul with satirical excellence. The final similarity is one we should deplore: shortened lives and untimely deaths leading to spoiled gifts and potentials. Burns and Keats, lived with great intensity, but were buried too soon, everyone agrees. Keats himself called the Scottish Tour “a sort of Prologue to the Life I intend to pursue”9—one that had started with the sad note of George leaving for America but, as he told Benjamin Bailey, still hopeful in the creative virtues of a walking trip which would help him “identify finer scenes, load [him] with grander Mountains, and strengthen more [his] reach in Poetry”.10 We are left to wonder when one or the other is mentioned alongside their more fortunate fellow poets, what they might have produced if they had lived the longer lives of their peers: Wordsworth and Blake, for example. There lies the double curse of a youth interrupted, although Burns did live a full ten years more than Keats—a tragedy which makes the readings, the investigations and the realm of endless possibilities all the more pleasurable to us: “How many bards gild the lapses of time / A few of them have ever been the food / Of my delighted fancy […]” (v. 1–3).11

• 12  J. Keats, Ode to a Nightingale, in ibid., p. 280.
• 13  R. Burns, “To a Haggis”, in T. Burke, The Collected Poems of Robert Burns, p. 133.
• 14  Letter from J. Keats to J. H. Reynolds, 3 May 1818, in H. E. Rollins (ed.), The Letters of John Ke (...)

5On the subject of organic affiliations between Keats and Burns, Dr. William Findlay wrote an interesting essay, dated 1898, entitledRobert Burns and the Medical Profession, which underlines the close intimacy the poet shared with the world of physicians. This nexus between poetry and medicine on the basis of the human bond linking the man of letters to the man of science (Dr. Mackenzie and John Moore for Burns, Stephens and Sir Astley Cooper for Keats) is, of course, nothing extraordinarily new in terms of theoretical perspectives. On Keats, plenty has been written already on the “weariness, the fever, and the fret”12 of the young surgical apprentice. However, it brought about a greater illustration of this pulsating sense of walking in another author’s footsteps: such gigantic steps which were left for Keats to explore by the “Rustic, haggis-fed” poet as “the trembling earth resounds his tread!” (v. 37–8).13 To have “axioms” of his poetry beating to the sound of the Scot’s, Keats, after some noisy stamping of his own on Burns’s floor, attempted to revive the memory of this “great soul” by “prov[ing it] upon [his] pulses”:14

• 16 Letter from J. Keats to Taylor & Hessey, 16 May 1817, in H. E. Rollins (ed.), The Letters of John K (...)
• 17  J. Keats, “To Ailsa Rock”, in J. Stillinger (ed.), John Keats: The Complete Poems, p. 206. On the (...)
• 18  “Cowden Clarke once inquired how far Keats liked his studies at the hospital. […] ‘The other day, (...)
• 19  J. Keats, Endymion: A Poetic Romance, in J. Stillinger (ed.), John Keats: The Complete Poems, p. 8 (...)
• 20  W. Findlay, Robert Burns and the Medical Profession, London, Alexander Gardner Paisley, 1898, p. 1 (...)

6Like the comfort of Chaucer’s earlier presence, which Keats felt as early as 1817—“I was not right in my head when I came—At Canterbury I hope the Remembrance of Chaucer will set me forward like a Billiard-Ball”16—, when he started dozing off, in Sleep and Poetry, on the father-poet’s book of verse, the pulses are infinite when it comes to celebrating the vision of a wandering shadow and the essence of “two dead eternities”: “Thou answer’st not, for thou art dead asleep; / Thy life is but two dead eternities, / The last in air, the former in the deep— / First with the whales, last with the eagle skies […]” (v. 9–12)17. In On Visiting the Tomb of Burns, the Romantic poet also navigates in between those same worlds, praising both heritage and experience in a “strange mood”, he writes to Tom, and “half asleep”.18 Dare we speak then of a “fellowship with essence”19 between Burns and Keats when the poet, a better writer for all his scientific awareness, takes pride in his plural identity, both captive and empathetic. The external reality becomes an internal phenomenon and the ideal of a poem is less thought out than it is felt within. Such vital feelings like a man’s pulse which the quick-witted Burns is able to detect even in the most “feeble” symptom of a beating heart. In his “Letter to John Goudie in Kilmarnock”, they take on the form of a diagnostic against empty words and bad medicine. From one pulse to the next, it can be seen as a “striking specimen”20 of those pre-Keatsian modes of medicinal verse. Down to the “gallopin consumption”, Burns has it all mapped out for his successor, and, in the end, celebrates, with a smile and in his own prosaic way, the marriage of observation and intuition:

• 22  J. Keats, Hyperion, in J. Stillinger (ed.), John Keats: The Complete Poems, p. 257.

7Surely in Keats, the “pulse” is much more feverish and bloody—“Without a motion, save their big hearts / Heaving in pain, and horribly convuls’d / With sanguine feverous boiling gurge of pulse” (II, 26-28)22, he writes in Hyperion—, mimicking some of the more graphic pages of his Anatomical and Physiological Notebook:

• 24  R. Burns, “Tam O’Shanter”, in T. Burke (ed.), The Complete Poems of Robert Burns, p. 5.

8But the objective stays the same, whether it comes out of the convulsions of a dying divinity or from the Barley-bree oozing out of the dead poet’s pores. Keats injects warm inspiration and a new sense of rhythm into Burns’s pulsating limbs. With drops of his own “inspiring bold John Barleycorn”,24 Burns is literally brought back to life by the “physician Nature” of his inheritor. In this life-in-death resuscitation process, drinking is about the only thing that saves you from disappearing completely—another reminder of Rabelais’s etymology: Pantagruel is the “all-thirsting one” born with gaping jaws (“la gueule ouverte”). And after the long draught which follows the giant’s birth, we are left with this piece of earthly philosophy: “Ah! thrice happy that year the man who had a cool, well-plenished wine-cellar underground (Book 2, chapter 2)”.

• 25  Charles Brown “was the most scrupulously honest man I ever knew—but wanted nobleness to lift this (...)
• 26 Ibid., I, 362. The other famous “Scot” of the Keats Circle was John Jeffrey, Georgiana’s second hus (...)
• 27  Letter from R. Burns to Mrs. Dunlop, 30 April 1787, in J. De Lancey Ferguson (ed.), The Letters of (...)
• 28  Letter from J. Keats to J. H. Reynolds, 11 July 1818, in H. E. Rollins (ed.), The Letters of John (...)
• 29  Letter from J. Keats to T. Keats, 2 July 1818, in ibid., I, p. 309.

9When Keats crossed the Scottish border and ventured onto unfamiliar territory, he did not take such a risk all by himself but remained under the protection of his loyal friend, Charles Brown. A very down-to-earth, mercantile and “liberal”25 spirit, Brown was not only an “inveterate traveler” but also a vigorous, half Welsh, half Scottish übermensch, who never got sick and who never got tired. This is how he depicts himself in a letter to Charles Dilke’s father: “Imagine me with a thick stick in my hand, the knapsack on my back, ‘with spectacles on nose’, a white hat, a tartan coat and trowsers, and a Highland plaid thrown over my shoulders … Keats calls me the Red Cross Knight, and declares my shadow is ready to split its sides as it follows me”.26 For all the vigor of his enthusiasm, Brown could not completely save Keats from ill-health and bad weather, nor could he spare him the pangs of exhaustion and its share of disappointments. The choice of bringing along with them on their journey the three-volume miniature set of Cary’s translation of Dante and a copy of Milton was certainly not random. Those two books were reminiscent of Burns’s famed “Satanism”, his hellish inclinations and taste for the natural “disorder” of things. And, for Keats, out of breath and fearing for his life, Dante and Milton stood as ominous symbols of what he felt was like a body without its soul crossing over into a Scottish Inferno: “I [Burns] am resolved to study the sentiments of a very respectable Personage, Milton’s Satan—‘Hail horrors! hail, infernal world!’”.27 After the hard climbs (Skiddaw, Ben Nevis), the coughs, the ruggedness and the chills (it was a cold month of July for a Southerner), Keats’s original bliss was starting to wear off, as is manifest in this Swiftian piece of bathetic humor taken from the only letter Keats wrote to Reynolds during the entire Tour: “That is I put down Mountains, Rivers, Lakes, dells, glens, Rocks, and Clouds, with beautiful enchanting, gothic picturesque fine … Grand, sublime—a few Blisters &c—and now you have our journey thus far”.28 Succumbing to fatigue and irritability also meant giving way to “positive incapability” as one starts to long for the not so mysterious, not so unfamiliar warmth of classical feelings: “I know not how it is, the Clouds, the sky, the Houses, all seem anti-Grecian & anti-Charlemagnish—I will endeavour to get rid of my prejudices, & tell you fairly about the Scotch”.29 In all fairness, Keats’s first signs of a consumptive mood made him quite ill-prepared for both the physical and the intellectual challenges ahead. But as he enjoyed the early days of Scottish dancing and feasting, he also seems to have been eating and drinking Burns up, as he would Chaucer or Shakespeare, surviving on such happy ingestions which would make his short life as a poet a little less hard to digest:

• 32  Letter from J. Keats to T. Keats, 9 July 1818, in ibid., I, pp. 319–20.

11 As he approaches the tombstone with similar empathy, in memory of the long lost “Scotch”, Keats finds traces of him in his own insides. They are the last living organs, although amputated and even at times “deadened”, of Burns’s “luxuriousness”. On 9 July 1818, Keats writes, thinking about Burns but really talking about himself: “Poor unfortunate fellow—his disposition was southern—how sad it is when a luxurious imagination is obliged in self-defence to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, and riot in thing[s] attainable that it may not have leisure to go mad after thing[s] which are not”.32 Against the impending threat of a “sickly imagination and a sick pride”, Keats fights for the glory of this “cold dream” born out of the Scottish hills, as he would against his own illness, reaching the unattainable, for the sake of the poet’s sanity: