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| Miro "Sunrise", January 21, 1940 |
"O give me a life of sensations rather a life of thought! "
How to be a poet without having the means to support herself? John Keats (1795-1821) died at twenty-five years of tuberculosis, but he left a work as dense and intense his life. This poet has struck me, less from his writings by his perpetual tension to poetry. The vitality of his poetry contrast indeed with the moral and physical frailty the young man. But this is a real lesson: poetry is a power that nothing can stop, not even death, since Keats's poems are among the best known: "A Thing of Beauty Is A Joy Forever" ... Lesson. The poet always is anyway. Kaets experienced all the difficulties possible: social, economic, health and love. Autodidact of humble origins, this romantic has suffered the most severe criticism of his contemporaries. As Marc Poree, translator of Keats in the Gallimard edition: "Keats was especially considered morally reprehensible. It mocked his Platonism sensual the author of 'Endymion ; we mocked his youthful hedonism, we disguises his cult Ruler of the beauty [...]".
What interests me about Keats, this is not so much his poetic journey that reality in which he was able to build a work. It is striking that the intensity can gush of misery. It is without doubt one of the most damaging metamorphoses for poets that modernity as it has deprived us two things: time and space. In Europe, we have the comfort, fabulous communication facilities, financial resources, networks and yet we lack everything that makes poetry possible: a place and a present habitable. The new strain of the poet is so to speak, to have none. The life and work of many poets prove that poetry has never had to opulence, the poet's poem have preferred the bread leaving it to burn the body and mind. Keats is an exceptional figure, a dark flash might have said Rene Char. The brilliance with which he was capable of writing is remarkable. He could not be a hobby, a vague desire for glory. A total commitment of body and mind.
decidedly Keats is a poet of another time because he had the time to write a work as strong in recent years and in emergencies. But his case is not so far from that of contemporaries who, if not under time pressure and disease, are trimming their writing space by modernity. The beauty sells, creates but does not occur, the misery is compensated by the entertainment. The total shrinkage is because we have more vocations. What are we called, except to eat, to participate in the effort of crisis, this new war effort, to be happy and stupid. I call calling the urgent desire to impress the world and our tasks. Keats was angry and he is an example to follow, absolutely. The poet is first one who refuses to be devoured by the world to be the one who eats.
Keats's life shows us that the poet and the poem are always born of a struggle, a resistance to something. Battle between the company and the desire for solitude, the battle between conformity and individuality, resistance to the invasion of work, the invasion of material comfort and psychological resistance to mold social policy. Writing poetry is always dissenting because it can spring up in spite of everything, anyway. The poetic writing refuses the circumstances, crosses or crushes, writing poetry refuses to be embastillée and goes every day to conquer time. She sculpts the time, size in the block of cold stone of social time and settled, she enchants the tight space and crushing of modernity. And it is precisely the moment when everything keeps us from writing that we write because we have plenty of time, we take all costs. We poets dance in the need ...
