The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It was on this day in 1818 that poet John Keats (books by this author) set sail to London after a six-week walking tour through northern England, Scotland, and Ireland. He and a friend had walked more than 600 miles.

Keats and his friend Charles Brown set off in June. Keats wrote to a friend: "I have many reasons for going wonder-ways: to make my winter chair free from spleen, to enlarge my vision, to escape disquisitions on poetry and Kingston-criticism, to promote digestion and economize shoe leather. I'll have leather buttons and belt, and if Brown hold his mind, 'over the hills we go.' If my books will keep me to it, then will I take all Europe in turn, and see the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them."

Keats had spent his life in London. He had never been out of southern England, and had never seen a mountain. Keats was determined to travel light, and he packed a knapsack with a shirt, stockings, a nightcap, towels, a brush and comb, snuff, and one book: a translation of Dante. He had good shoes and a walking stick. Keats and Brown were often mistaken for traveling salesmen.

The two friends set off from Lancaster, and from there they walked through England's Lake District. Keats went to pay his respects to the famous William Wordsworth, but Wordsworth was not at home, and Keats felt betrayed when he learned that Wordsworth was off campaigning for a conservative politician. Wordsworth's house, Rydal Mount, was already a tourist attraction and fancier than Keats had imagined. Keats left a note and the men continued walking. Keats felt better after seeing Dove Cottage, the small home where Wordsworth had written most of his great poems earlier in his career.

As they continued north, Keats was amazed at the bleak landscape of mountains and moors. He thought it was beautiful but unsettling. As he walked, he discovered that he was moved by people more than scenery. On June 29, they set off walking at 4 a.m., hiked up the mountain Skiddaw, from which they could see all the way to the Irish Sea and Scotland, and continued to the town of Ireby, where they saw a performance of traditional dancing. Keats wrote: "There was as fine a row of boys and girls as you ever saw; some beautiful faces, and one exquisite mouth. I never felt so near the glory of patriotism, the glory of making, by any means, a country happier. This is what I like better than scenery."

Keats was unimpressed by the food on their trip. He wrote in a letter: "We dined yesterday on dirty bacon dirtier eggs and dirtiest Potatoes with a slice of Salmon." In Scotland they subsisted almost entirely on oatcakes and whiskey — Keats hated the oatcakes but enjoyed the whiskey. Also in Scotland, Keats made a pilgrimage to Alloway, the birthplace of the poet Robert Burns. He thought the Ayrshire countryside was stunning, and declared that the River Doon was "the sweetest river I ever saw." He stood on the Brig o' Doon, a bridge Burns wrote about in his poems, and enjoyed a large pinch of snuff. He found Burns's Cottage and drank whiskey with the custodian, who told Keats countless stories about Burns and would not stop talking (or drinking) while Keats wrote a sonnet. Keats could only understand a few words the custodian said, and described him as "a mahogany-faced old jackass."

Keats and Brown continued through Scotland, with a brief detour into Northern Ireland. They averaged 10 miles a day, but that included days of rest, and many days they walked 20 miles or more. On August 2, they hiked to the top of Ben Nevis, the tallest peak in the British Isles. Keats's health had been questionable before the trip, and now he had developed a bad cold — the strenuous exercise through damp bogs made things worse. A doctor advised him to quit the walking tour, so on this day in 1818 he headed back to London, while Brown continued on walking another 1,200 miles. In a one-year span following the walking tour, Keats wrote "Hyperion," "The Eve of St. Agnes," "To Autumn," "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode to a Nightingale." Keats died of tuberculosis less than three years after his walking tour.

It's the birthday of poet Sara Teasdale (books by this author), born in St. Louis (1884). She grew up in a wealthy family. Her mother was 40 when Sara came along, and her parents had not planned to have another child. They doted on their daughter, and were always anxious about her — if she had even a mild cold she was put in bed for days. So Sara grew up thinking of herself as sickly, even an invalid, when in reality she was probably no sicker than the average child. She didn't go to school until the age of nine because her parents thought she was too delicate. Her three brothers and sisters were all in their teens when she was born, and she wasn't allowed outside to play with other children. She was often lonely, and she made up stories and poems to amuse herself.

She attended a series of girls' schools, and eventually began to submit poems for publication. Her parents paid for the publication of her first book, Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems (1907).She received enough positive feedback to continue writing, and she eventually became a well-loved poet. Her collection Rivers to the Sea (1915) was a best-seller, and Love Songs (1917) won several major awards, including the award that would become known as the Pulitzer Prize.

Despite her success, Teasdale remained insecure and convinced that she was frail. Her marriage to a wealthy St. Louis businessman fell apart. In 1931, an old suitor, the poet Vachel Lindsay, killed himself. Teasdale was devastated. In 1933, she committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills; later that year her collection Strange Victory was published.

She wrote "The Broken Field":

My soul is a dark ploughed field
In the cold rain;
My soul is a broken field
Ploughed by pain.
Where windy grass and flowers
Were growing,
The field lies broken now
For another sowing.

Great Sower, when you tread
My field again,
Scatter the furrows there
With better grain.

It's the birthday of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (books by this author), born in Washington, D.C., on this day in 1896. She's best known for her book The Yearling (1938), which was the best-selling novel in America in 1938 and won the Pulitzer Prize the following year.

The Yearling is about an adolescent boy in rural Florida who adopts an orphaned baby deer named Flag, becomes really close to the deer, and then, in the end, has to shoot Flag because it's eating all the family's crops.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings also loved to cook. She once said, "I get as much satisfaction from preparing a perfect dinner for a few good friends as from turning out a perfect paragraph in my writing." She even published her own cookbook, called Cross Creek Cookery (1942), a few years after she won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

It's the birthday of physicist Ernest O. Lawrence, born in Canton, South Dakota (1901). He was a curious child — at age two, he tried to figure out how matches worked and ended up lighting his clothes on fire. His best friend in Canton was a boy named Merle Tuve, who would go on become a famous geophysicist. The boys built gliders together and constructed a crude radio transmitting station.

Lawrence worked his way through college — he received an undergraduate degree from the University of South Dakota and graduate degrees from the University of Minnesota and Yale. He accepted a position at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1930 he became the youngest full professor there. Lawrence put in 70-hour weeks at the Berkeley Radiation Lab, and he expected everyone else to do the same. The Lab was open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

It was there that he invented a machine that he called a "proton merry-go-round," better known as the cyclotron. Lawrence's first version of the cyclotron was very makeshift — it involved a kitchen chair, clothes racks, and a pie pan — but eventually he produced a more sophisticated device. The cyclotron was a machine that could accelerate particles and then hurl them at atoms to smash the atoms open. This allowed scientists to discover radioactive isotopes of elements and sometimes new elements. In 1940, Lawrence won the Nobel Prize for his invention.

On this date in 1929, the Graf Zeppelin airship took off from Lakehurst, New Jersey, on a round-the-world flight. It was the first such flight by a passenger aircraft. The trip was partially funded by media mogul William Randolph Hearst; he covered half the cost in exchange for exclusive media rights in the United States and Britain. There were 61 passengers and crew on the historic flight: 60 men and one woman. Lady Grace Drummond-Hay, a journalist, covered the flight for Hearst. She was also the first woman to fly around the world. The trip from Lakehurst to Lakehurst took just over 21 days, including stops.

Graf Zeppelin had a remarkable nine-year career. Before its round-the-world trip, it was also the first commercial passenger flight across the Atlantic Ocean. It flew more than a million miles, safely carried 34,000 passengers, flew a scientific mission over the North Pole. But the age of the giant dirigibles came to an end when Graf Zeppelin's sister ship, the Hindenburg, went up in flames in 1937.