Why I love John Keats

When I graduated from college my mother gave me a copy of The Oxford Book of English Poetry (edited by Dame Helen Gardner, not Christopher Ricks) which she inscribed, "to thine own self be true." My mother was a writer, a journalist, and I'm pretty sure she wanted me to be a writer too although she wouldn't have been unhappy if I'd become a lawyer or a U.S. Senator from a small state with a liberal electorate.

I thought of my mother the other day, reading yet another book on Greek history and philosophy for a book I'm writing about the classical world, trying to imagine what she meant when she inscribed the book she gave me with the words, "to thine own self be true."

The Greek sense of self in the classical world was achieved by fulfilling the notion of the good, paideia. The notion was that you knew (you were aware because you'd been educated, the Greek regard for and impulse toward education can never be overestimated) when you were not being your best and that this knowledge either made you happy or sad. If it made you sad you would change youself because you wanted to be your best, you wanted to be the best that is within you because the best that is within in you is yourself.

Now it's not enough to just have a self, you have to find the self you're meant to have, finding the self is what it now means to be human, the presumption being that you will never have a self if you don't look for it, that a self doesn't just come to you, a self only comes through searching for it. And then, once found, a self can be many things, a construct of good and bad, health and disease, happiness and sadness.

The Oxford Book of English Poetry is a bulky little book that purports to cover the entire English poetic canon. By now it's really out of date, having been given to me by my mother in 1972, and my copy excludes contemporary poets like Ted Hughes and Tom Raworth.

When I first opened the book I started reading where the words felt best, and read John Clare. Now I just wander around, reading a poem here and there, always coming back to John Keats, whose self seems so well made that it could have belonged to no one other than him, and is a voice neither ancient or new.