Another reason that Keats believed that his work was ‘too smokeable’, in other words his poem would go up in smoke too easily, because the critics may have thought that Keats would go to any lengths for fame, even taking a well known fairy tale story and turning it into a money maker for himself. In a letter written to his friend in October 1818 Keats revealed that fame was not on his agenda as he described himself as a “camelion poet”, ‘camelion’ has connotations of something which takes on the colours of its background in order to camouflage, in other words, Keats was not interested in the conventional things of poetry, he wanted to be invisible to others, but his work to be seen. Keats did not want fame, but a reason for him believing his work would be subject to ridicule is that others may have believed he was only writing for fame.
When Keats was preparing for the publication of Isabella he condemned it’s ‘inexperience’; ‘simplicity’ and ‘mawkishness’ in terms of its language and the storyline, Keats may have just been covering for himself and his reputation in case of ridicule, or his writing skills had improved during the eighteen months prior to its publication, and so he looked back on it as inferior to his later poems. The idea of ‘inexperience’ can be viewed during the introduction of the poem, which is quite nursery rhyme like in structure:
“They could not in the self-same mansion dwell
Without some stir of heart, some malady,
They could not sit at meals but feel how well
It soothed each to be the other by;
They could not, sure, beneath the same roof sleep”
The use of repetition of ‘They could not’, along with the AB rhyming structure can be viewed as quite an immature poetical approach, which would be cause for ridicule, however, it is quite in tone with the poem which is a fairy tale, and these are nursery rhyme like, and also the repetition is a medieval feature and so keeps the poem in tone with it’s original story time setting. However, it is an example of one of Keats worries he held about Isabella’s publication. Also at the time of writing the poem he was in need of money and so his heart and soul may not have been involved so much in this one as his other work, because it was developed for a very different reason to Keats’s normal love of poetry.
Keats’s friends thought well of the poem, and this may have been because it suggests that beauty can be found in the darker aspects of life, and so this shows that Keats stuck to what he and other Romantic poets alike believed in writing about, negative capability. Negative capability is when a poet takes inspiration from not only the beautiful and cheerful things, for example life, and then contrasts them with inspiration from ideas such as death.
“Nurture besides, and life, from human fears,
From the fast mouldering head there shut from view:
So that the jewel, safely casketed,
Came forth, and in perfuméd leafits spread”.
This quotation highlights the main source of negative capability viewed in Isabella, from the heart-rending death of Lorenzo; Keats describes a positive effect which this has placed into the world, which is life. Although it is not human life, which Isabella (as described in stanza forty seven) realised could not happen with Lorenzo, even after she had invested everything on him, it is the life of a plant. The basil which she had placed his decomposing head in is thriving upon the dead head and Isabella’s tears of grief for her loss. Negative capability holds quite a powerful message that all events in life have positive and negative ideas attached to them, and as Keats stuck to his usual techniques of poetry, he has made the story into his own and so this would not be subject to ridicule, especially among his circle of Romantic writer friends who would use negative capability in their own work.
At the time of writing this poem Keats was already experiencing love, and it was also in a vaguely similar situation to that of Lorenzo and Isabella, because he was forbidden to love Fanny Brawne and so this could have fuelled his ideas for the poem along with the original story. Therefore, this poem should not have been susceptible to criticism because Keats may have been writing down his feelings upon his own love in the form of two characters, and it wasn’t just ‘stealing’ another’s work, he was adapting a story that connected with his life and filling it with his passion. This is viewed in a letter to Fanny when Keats identified with Lorenzo:
“In my present state of Health I feel too much separated from you and could almost speak to you in the words of Lorenzo’s Ghost to Isabella:
Your beauty grows upon me and I feel
A greater love through all my essence steal.”
However, it could have been that after all his own criticism when Keats was ill he finally appreciated this poem as he could identify with it more.
