Keats. It was the strong individuality, the reflection of the personal moods of his own nature, the power of intimate observation reflected in Wordsworth's poetry, that made him seem so worthy to be admired. It was Haydon's intense enthusiasm for ancient Greek sculpture that led Keats to deep interest in things antique, and particularly in the beauty of ancient sculpture. Keats was almost too young to succeed in passing beyond his masters. Leigh Hunt was, however, even more of a master to Keats than the three whom Keats named; and rather an unfortunate mastery that of Hunt was, for the overdaintiness and luxuriousness of his fancy was so pleasing to Keats that a large share of Keats's own verse is too heavily laden with the same qualities. Yet Hunt had begun to use the old heroic couplet verse in a free rhythm, supple in movement, lithe and lilting in such way as the eighteenth-century hinged and jointed heroic couplet could never be. Keats imitated Hunt in this, but passed far beyond him in the free modulation which he was able to give to the couplet. There is no grace in even Pope's couplet like that in the following from the beginning of Keats's Endymion: A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, of health, and quiet breathing. And yet, popular as these lines are, they are by no means to be thought of as among Keats's best. His poetry, even though it does reveal many traces of the work of others, was epochmaking, for from his time on it was possible for a poet to wed music and meaning without meeting the frown of any one who was critical. In fact, it may be said that Keats more than any other poet of the era created the taste for rich melody in verse. However strongly Keats was under the spell of this or that old and much-used subject matter, there is much that is new and unexpected in his work. It is acknowledged that his influence upon writers since his death has been incomparably greater than all influences of the past upon him, though it has been in matters of form, not in ideas, that he has reappeared to a great extent in those who have followed him. "Wordsworth has influenced most the ideas of succeeding poets, Keats their forms," said Lowell. A seventeenth-century writer once defined poetry as "the dreams of them that are awake." Keats was as much a dreamer as Coleridge, but the work of Keats, unlike that of Coleridge, could never have been done by one who was not thoroughly conscious of every step taken in its doing. A discriminating criticism of Keats was this made by Lowell, that Keats was over-languaged, but, the critic added, in that was implied the possibility of falling back to the perfect mean of diction. "It is only by the rich that the costly plainness, which at once satisfies the taste and the imagination, is attainable." Keats never in his short career quite fully passed beyond the influence of Leigh Hunt and others like him, in their familiar, rather over-sentimental way of looking at and handling poetic things, but that influence is easily seen only in the first volume of his poems, published in 1817. There were thirty poems in that first volume, eighteen of them being sonnets, of which the most famous is the one entitled On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, quoted in this book on page 56. These poems show at once the fact that the poet looked at nature in detail, and that each exquisite detail was to him as if it had just been seen for the first time. There is more of mere prettiness in the poem, without title, beginning "I stood tip-toe upon a little hill," than in any other one of these early effusions: A little noiseless noise among the leaves, Here are sweet peas, on tip-toe for a flight; Were I in such a place, I sure should pray That nought less sweet, might call my thoughts away, Fanning away the dandelion's down; Than the light music of her nimble toes How she would start, and blush, thus to be caught Second, came Endymion. Wordsworth called it "a pretty piece of paganism." And so it is. Here the imaginative wealth of the mind of Keats began to reveal itself, and a sort of "faery voyage after beauty" is the result. Still this poem is not the languishing thing that such a description might suggest. The subject is Greek; and surely the Greeks were virile enough. And, too, the rich red English blood can be traced through the old Greek veins which form the texture of the poem. The sensations described are such as one would feel on English soil. There is even a little psychology in the poem of Endymion, though it is put in language that is far from analytical; as, for instance, How sickening, how dark the dreadful leisure By a foreknowledge of unslumbrous night! We still see the somewhat falsely distorted writing and thinking of the school of Hunt surviving in these lines. In April, 1818, Keats wrote in one of his letters, "I have been hovering for some time between an exquisite sense of the luxurious and a love of philosophy." And again, "I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the world." The poet, now, is beginning to realize that besides the passion for beauty there is, as something of worth, the desire to think and to do. In June of that year he finished his poem entitled Isabella; or The Pot of Basil, which has inspired more than one eminent painter to superb brush work; in this poem Keats at least inspired others to do, and the production of the poem itself was also a deed of note. "Poetry must surprise by a fine excess," said Keats. It does in Isabella. There is still too much, as in the earlier poems, of material with sense appeal alone; for, while the poem is intended to tell a story, the action is embarrassed by the richness of description. It is not Greek veins now so much as medieval veins that Keats is flushing with blood of the English heart, as stanzas XXXV and XLI especially disclose, and even more especially stanza XXXIX. In this poem perfection of form is much more conspicuous than in the Endymion and the poems of 1817. In the preface to Endymion, Keats had said that he wished once again after that poem to touch upon the mythology of Greece before he should bid it farewell. This wish found fulfillment in Hyperion, which he began to write in August, 1818, after four months of tramping in the Scotch Highlands. Keats was now strongly under the spell of Milton, a very different spell from that exercised by Leigh Hunt. He strove in Hyperion to emulate the majesty of the style of Paradise Lost. Had he lived longer and worked for years upon this poem, finishing the ten books projected, instead of breaking off in the middle of the third book, he might have mastered that style. Keats's attempt is one of the best of modern ones to handle the ancient myth of the struggle between the warring powers of heaven. He pictures the struggle in which Jove overthrew Saturn. But with him the struggle is very modern, purely symbolistic of the subduing of the universe by beauty, for 'tis the eternal law That first in beauty should be first in might. From Hyperion Keats turned aside, beginning in January, 1819, to write a small group of poems, and by the fall of that year completed The Eve of St. Agnes, Lamia, six odes, and La Belle Dame Sans Merci,· the last named and one of the odes, the Ode on a Grecian Urn, deserving to be thought of in a group by themselves because they are the two separate highest points to which his poetry rose. In The Eve of St. Agnes the author quite evidently has learned the art of story-telling. Here at last by him, unity of interest is attained in narrative. Few who seek for the permanent pleasure which exquisite poetry gives do not know the first three stanzas of this poem. Few there are who do not like often to think of the fifteenth stanza and "Madeline asleep in Lap of legends old," and the lovely twentyfifth stanza, which is a tone-color poem almost by itself. Then, there is nowhere else to be found a catalogue of things which appeal to the physical taste, but which is so little filled with the grossness of mere palate tickling, as stanza XXX. In stanza XXXIII we have a hint of the Belle Dame which was to come. The richly and felicitously ornamented Eve of St. Agnes is in its simple romanticism the tribute to Keats's study of Chatterton, though it was the Endymion which he had dedicated to Chatterton. In one poem of this group, the Ode to a Nightingale, there are struck powerful musical tones to which the poet had not risen before, as Thou wast not born for death, Immortal Bird! |