Devastating reviews

A lesson from Keats / Issue 1,140

Oh, hi friends!

Does criticism hold you back?

When we were in Rome last month we visited the Keats-Shelley house, a museum created from the final home of John Keats, who died there at age 25, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who later died at age 29.

What I wanted to tell you about was a small description next to a first edition of one of Keats’s poems. 

Two paragraphs contain the lessons of testing oneself, the effect of feedback, and how we might press on. 

I typed it up. Here it is.

Endymion was Keats’s second publication after the 1917 Poems. Based around the Greek legend of Endymion, the shepherd from Mount Latmos who fell in love with Cynthia, the Moon, it was his first attempt to write a long poem: ‘It will be a test,’ he wrote to Benjamin Bailey in October 1817, ‘a trial of my Powers of Imagination and chiefly of my invention…by which I must make 4000 lines of one bare circumstance and fill them with Poetry.’

When Endymion received devastating reviews Keats was undismayed. Writing the poem had been, as he had intended, a test. He knew its faults better than anyone, and was now ready to get on with new work. ‘Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own Works’, he explained to James Hessey. 

How might we apply this strategy to our own lives?

1. Test yourself by attempting something new

2. Release it to the public

3. Receive reviews

4. Be undismayed

5. Get on with new work

And remember: “Praise or blame has but a momentary effect.”

By the way, here’s the first line of Endymion:

“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.”

Life on the Spanish Steps, as seen from Keats’s bedroom.