I was in Winchester, England, this week to offer a poetry workshop at Winchester College, a boarding school founded in 1382. The students, teachers, and I met in a room of the college library. We read Sandra Alcosser’s “What Makes the Grizzlies Dance,” and I shared two of my own poems featuring deer, grizzly bears, and butterflies, all leading to a prompt about encounters with animals. The students told me they weren’t accustomed to this kind of writing, yet they had plenty to say and volunteered to share their work with each other.
This wasn’t my first visit to Winchester. I’ve been here several times to meet with colleagues or students at the University of Winchester, and nearly always, someone will mention Keats’ visit to the city two hundred years ago. He wrote “To Autumn” there in September 1819, and visitors can follow the walk thought to inspire the poem—around the cathedral, down College Street, past the house where Jane Austen died only two years before in 1817, past Winchester College and along the River Itchen, one of the chalk rivers of southern England.
An article in the Guardian, however, says the view from St. Giles Hill may have inspired Keats as he looked down on fields recently purchased by a wealthy banker. The poem, seen in this light, has an edge of social commentary during a time when landowners monopolized the harvest, and food prices were high. Scholar Nicholas Roe suggests that patterns in “To Autumn” parallel the sensibility of King Alfred the Great (849-899 CE), famous for driving the Vikings out of England but also a poet and a humanitarian who argued for translation so that more people, men presumably, could be educated. A large statue of King Alfred stands near the ancient entrance to Winchester, though it wouldn’t have been there in Keats’ day.
Regardless of where he walked, and I imagine he walked in various places over the course of two months, Keats would not have been the first poet to combine multiple sources of inspiration into one poem. Apples, fields, flowers, river, swallows and gnats appear in his lines, and like a painter, he did not simply imitate what he saw but created his own design. It may even be that the rhythm of walking influenced his poem.
Rumor has it that Keats intended to stay longer in Winchester so that he could use the library at Winchester College. I’m curious what he wanted to research, or maybe he just wanted to prowl through books. In any case, Winchester College refused access because he was not a gentleman. In his letters, Keats complained about the absence of a “tolerable library," but he admired the bookstore on College Street, then called Robbins and now P & G Wells. Around the corner is The Wykeham Arms, a pub he was said to frequent.
Hearsay surrounds Keats’ brief time in Winchester and a good deal is documented through letters and scholarship. In snooping about, other details have surfaced. He was short of money, and he hoped to do what was necessary to become a more popular writer. I assume this would have allowed him to make a living from his work. And during his stay in Winchester he wrote 1500 lines. Divided by the 58 days he stayed there, he averaged 26 lines per day. Some say he aspired to 50, a goal I’m keeping in mind.
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