By: FATIMA ABDULLAH ALOTAIBI
Reviewed By: Dr. Mohammad Aleem, Chief News Editor, ICN Group
NEW DELHI: It is an utmost source of pleasure for me that I could get the chance to read a poet who is admired and revered by the whole English world as one of the most loved and respected ones. His popularity has surpassed all boundaries of language and nations. Over the years, his reputation increased day-by-day.
This Book, A Mansion of Many Apartments is the best outcome of a very versatile and talented Saudi writer, Fatimah Abdullah Alotaibi. She has very painstakingly taken this topic for her research and serious reading. It instigates readers to read much more about this enigmatic poet of English, John Keats. How as a poet and a person he evolved through the toughest phase of his life is a thing to reckon with.
Everybody knows that Keats had got a short life, which was full of misery and despondency. But the greatness of that person was that even after his age and people did not recognise and supported him as a poet when he was trying hard to establish himself as a literary person, he never lost a chance to raise his voice and air his thoughts. Later on, the whole world bowed to his greatness with full humility and accepted him as one of the most talented poets of his time.
John Keats was one of the most gifted romantic poets, no doubt. Unfortunately, he could not live long. He was born in a modest lower middle class family in 1795 and died of tuberculosis in 1821. He was two brothers, George and Tom and a sister, Fanny, with whom he was very close. His mother was a caring and loving woman, but suffered heavily at the hand of her own folly when she remarried quickly after the unfortunate demise of her first husband, a stable keeper, who fell from his horse one ominous day while riding home. She could not pass her time composedly with her second husband and married third time. All these years, children suffered heavily due to dispossession of a stable family and it left a deep impact on the mind of the young and very sensitive John Keats. He became melancholic and solitary.
He was a carefree child, but serious in nature. The very nature of thinking deeply on the state of the day to day affairs and love for beauty made him a poet.
However, he did not study literature as an academic subject, ever. He was basically trained as a doctor, but his bent of mind and course of heart drove him towards the enigmatic field of poetry. He was a born and gifted poet in true sense that needed not such formal education and training.
He was very fond of Shakespeare and Spenser. Sonnet of the great playwright especially attracted him the most and encouraged him to compose beautiful Sonnets like him. He learned the craft of writing by reading extensively to the great legends of English literature.
His first book of poetry came out in 1817 titled, Endymion, which could not garner the requisite support of the critics of his time. One of the known critics of his time, J. G. Lockhart attacked him in his magazine, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, in these words:
“It is better and wiser thing to be starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to shop, Mr. John, back to plasters, pills and ointment boxes.”
The first man of letters to motivate Keats was Leigh Hunt. He not only recognized his talent but his contemporary Shelly also. He also published Keats poems very first time.
Soon after the completion of Endymion, Keats had written “Isabella,” an adaptation of the story of the Pot of Basil in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, in 1817–18. But he was not satisfied with it. During the year 1819, he came out with the best literary fecundity. He composed greatest poems like “Lamia,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the great odes (“On Indolence,” “On a Grecian Urn,” “To Psyche,” “To a Nightingale,” “On Melancholy,” and “To Autumn”), and the two versions of Hyperion. This poetry was composed under the strain of illness and his growing love for Browne, a girl of integrity and compassion.
Unfortunately, Keats did not live long after composing these best poems and succumbed to his grievous illness in a faraway place, Rome where he had gone to recuperate on the advice of some of his friends.
Many people say that if this great poet had lived his full long life, he would have given many great volumes of poetry. But God had desired otherwise. And we should be content with the person and the poet as he was and as he had shaped himself.
The author teaches English Literature at Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. She has got her doctorate in English Literature from college of arts, KSU in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. She has obtained two MA degrees the first was in English Literature from Nottingham University, England, UK; and the second was in teaching technology and CALL from college of education in KSU, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Similarly, the author is interested in translation where she translated and published, An Introduction to Criticism: Literature, Film, Culture.
I hope that this book will encourage readers to delve deep into the life and work of this great English romantic poet.
It is available on www.amazon.in and priced at Rs. 400/- It is very magnificently published by Magnifera Publications Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, India.
