A Poetical Gathering

 

I am just a fly on the wall in the house of painter Robert Haydon in 1817, on that December 28 evening in London when he invited the writers Charles Lamb, William Wordsworth, and John Keats for dinner. What if we somehow could have a recording of the conversation of that dinner? Wouldn't that be something? In our current time, it's nothing to record a meeting with the click of a button. But in 1817? Only what is left behind in letters and journals lives on for us to ponder now.

Haydon was at that time working on the grand painting "Christ's Entry", a piece which he worked on for years, inserting the faces of Wordsworth, Keats, and Lamb, among other historical figures like Newton and Voltaire in the crowd on the side of Christ entering Jerusalem on the donkey. This invitation to dinner was partly to see the progress of the painting that each of these poets were part of. 

You cannot bring up Wordsworth and Keats without also making the connections of the friendships of Coleridge and Shelley, among other poets and writers in London at the time. The first and second generations of the Romantics mingle here, a period in English history that produced some of the most beautiful poetry and thoughts on nature. As a counter to the purely rational reductive Enlightenment period of thought, the Romantics did not look to science but to nature and beauty to find truth. 

In reading this encounter and about the intertwining of their creative lives, I am reminded that there is a real importance of collaboration in the sense of sharing one's work with others, but it does open up the door to receiving critique. Sometimes critique will come through other opinions - Wordsworth did not have the warmest regard for Keats's poem "Endymion" that he was invited to read from on a different evening as an unfinished work. When Keats finished reading a passage, everyone looked to the elder Wordsworth for praise of the younger Keats and he coolly remarked, "A very pretty piece of Paganism." 

Hopefully more often it is praise and encouragement that comes to us through creative friendships. Though it is a very difficult thing to open up one's heart to reveal creative work. When you create something, it is heart and soul that is put into the work, and the aim is work that looks toward a perfected skill. It is always a process of progress and improvement. In just a two year time period from this 1817 dinner, Keats for example will reach his epoch talent, writing poems that are absolute treasures. We study them today as masterpieces (his splendid Odes for example). It is an encouraging thought that in Keats's time he was not fully appreciated. Of course he sadly died of consumption at age 25 and I wonder if he would have seen any of such deserving praise for his work if he had lived longer.

Oh the wondering! Well, it's been an enjoyable evening dropping into a creative-filled dinner discussion. Until next time.