KEBLE, JOHN (1792-1866), English poet and divine, the author of the Christian Year, was born on April 25, 1792, at Fair ford, Gloucestershire, the second child of the Rev. John Keble. He became a scholar of Corpus Christi college, Oxford, in 1807, and in i8io obtained double first class honours, a distinction which had been obtained only once before, by Sir Robert Peel. After his election to an Oriel fellowship in 1811 Keble gained the University prizes, both for the English essay and also for the Latin essay. Oriel College was, at that time, the centre of all the finest ability in Oxford. Copleston, Davison, Whately, were among the fellows who elected Keble; Arnold, Pusey, Newman, were soon after added to the society. In 1815 Keble was ordained deacon, and priest in 1816. His real bent and choice were towards a pastoral cure in a country parish; but he remained till 1823 in Oxford, act ing first as a public examiner in the schools, then as a tutor, when he returned to Fairford to assist his father, and with his brother to serve one or two small and poorly endowed curacies in the neighbourhood of Coln.
In 1827 he published anonymously the Christian Year (2 vols., Oxford). The poems which make up that book had been the silent gathering of years. There is one for each Sunday and for each Saint's day and festival observed by the Church of England. Keble had purposed to keep them beside him, correcting and im proving them, as long as he lived, and to leave them to be pub lished only "when he was fairly out of the way." This resolution was at length overcome by the importunities of his friends, and by the desire of his father to see his son's poems in print before he died. Between 1827 and 1872 one hundred and fifty-eight edi tions appeared, and it has been largely reprinted since.
In 1831 Keble succeeded Milman as professor of poetry at Oxford. He delivered a series of lectures, printed as Praelectiones academicae, clothed in excellent idiomatic Latin (as was the rule), in which he expounded a theory of poetry which was original and suggestive. He distinguished between what he called primary and secondary poets—the first employing poetry to relieve their own hearts; the second, poetic artists, composing poetry from some other and less impulsive motive. Of the former kind were Homer, Lucretius, Burns, Scott ; of the latter were Euripides, Dryden, Milton. His regular visits to Oxford kept him in intercourse with his old friends at Oriel. Catholic emancipation and the Reform Bill had deeply stirred, not only the political spirit at Oxford, but also the church feeling which had long been stagnant. Newman wrote, "On Sunday July 14, 1833, Mr. Keble preached the assize sermon in the University pulpit. It was published under the title of National Apostasy. I have ever considered and kept the day as the start of the religious movement of 1833." The occasion of this sermon was the suppression, by Earl Grey's Reform ministry, of ten Irish bishoprics. Against Erastianism Keble had long chafed
inwardly, and he now asserted the claim of the church to a heav enly origin and a divine prerogative. About the same time, and partly stimulated by Keble's sermon, leading spirits in Oxford began a systematic course of action to revive High Church princi ples and patristic theology. Thus arose the Tractarian movement, a name it received from the famous Tracts for the Times. If Keble is to be reckoned, as Newman would have it, as the primary author of the movement, it was from Pusey that it received one of its best known names, and in Newman that it soon found its genuine leader. To the tracts Keble made only four contributions: —No. 4, containing an argument, in the manner of Bishop Butler, to show that adherence to apostolical succession is the safest course; No. 13, which explains the principle on which the Sunday lessons in the church service are selected ; No. 4o, on marriage with one who is unbaptized ; No. 89, on the mysticism attributed to the early fathers.
In 1835 Keble married Miss Clarke, and became vicar of Hursley, Hampshire, a living to which he had been presented by his attached pupil, Sir William Heathcote, and which continued to be Keble's cure for the remainder of his life. In 1841 the tracts were brought to an abrupt termination by the publication of New man's tract No. 90 (see NEWMAN, JOHN). The same year in which the ecclesiastical storm burst Keble's tenure of the professor ship of poetry closed, and thenceforward he was seen but rarely in Oxford. No other public event ever affected Keble so deeply as the secession of Newman to the Church of Rome in 1845. It was to him both a public and a private sorrow, which nothing could repair. In all the ecclesiastical contests of the twenty years which followed 1845, Keble resolutely maintained those High Anglican principles with which his life had been identified. These absorbing duties, added to his parochial work, left little time for literature. But in 1846 he published the Lyra Innocentium; and in 1863 he completed a life of Bishop Wilson. He died at Bournemouth on March 29, 1866, and was buried at Hursley.
'See J. T. Coleridge, Memoir of John Keble (1869). The following is a list of his writings:—Christian Year (1827) ; Psalter (1839) ; Prae lectiones Academicae (1844) ; Lyra Innocentium (1846) ; Sermons Academical (1848) ; Argument against Repeal of Marriage Law, and Sequel (1857) ; Eucharistical Adoration (1857) ; Life of Bishop Wilson (1863) ; Sermons Occasional and Parochial (1867). Posthumous publi cations: Village Sermons on the Baptismal Service (1868) ; Miscellane ous Poems (1869) ; Letters of Spiritual Counsel (187o) ; Sermons for the Christmas Year, etc. (II vols., 1875-8o) ; Occasional Papers and Reviews (1877) ; Studia Sacra (1877) ; Outlines of Instruction or Medi tation (188o).