Keats

ems of

accurately struck in the motto fro

licity can fa

y delight wi

hundred years been hampered. And the spirit which animates him is essentially the spirit of delight: delight in the beauty of nature and the vividness of sensation, delight in the charm

influence of the older English poets and of Leigh Hunt. The former influence shows itself everywhere in the substance and spirit of the poems, but less, for the present, in their form and style. Keats had by this time thrown off the eighteenth-century stiffness which clung to his earliest efforts, but he had not yet adopted, as he was about to do, a vocabulary and diction of his own full of licences caught from the Elizabethans and

y silkiness

peculation of

t mossiness o

explored its w

example-of turning nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns at his convenience. For the rest, Keats writes in the ordinary English of his day, with much more feeling for beauty of language than for correctness, and as yet without any formed or assured poetic style. Single lines and pas

with the use of frequent disyllabic rhymes, and an occasional enjambement or 'overflow.' In the Specimen of an Induction to a Poem, and in the fragment of the poem itself, entitled Calidore (a name borrowed from the hero of Spenser's sixth book,) as well as in the unna

your round of

nt mari

er respects varies the rhythm far more boldly, making free use of the overflow, placing his full pauses at any point in a line rather than at the end, and adopt

res and aspirations of the poetic life, letting one train of images follow another with no particular plan or sequence, is all that Keats as yet attempts: except in the Calidore fragment. And that is on the w

reezes from t

lew aside the

ong from Philom

cense from the

d, the far-hear

oon in ether

ly expressions in the complete tas

om the high-roof'd

el a shining qui

iterature and friendship. In that to Cowden Clarke, Keats acknowledges t

w, but that I've

aught me all the

eet, the terse, t

h pathos, and wh

wels that elo

g like birds o

, and more, Milt

nd more, meek Eve'

e the sonnet s

max, and then

me the grand

Atlas, stronge

e that more tha

he rapier-po

t Epic was of

spanning all li

the reader of a later poet's more masterly expression of the same sentiment:-'Me rather all that bowery loneliness-'. The two lines on Spenser are of interest as conveying one of those incidental criticisms on poetry by a poet, of wh

shallow ship

swallow sheres

re or pilot

vas with the

ical effects of verse, and the practice of Spenser is said to have suggested to him a special theory as to the use and value of the iteration of vowel sounds in poetry. What his theory was we are not clearly told, neither do I think it can easily be discovered from his practic

and of nature, come naively jostling one another in the E

, though none els

still, that you

have had much

grass at my bes

es for you. These

e, the freshest

pillow'd on a

ofty cliff, whi

n waves. The s

et with their q

s a field of

poppies show the

eless that the

oats that pes

her side, out

le, streak'd with

e a canvass'd

silver curling

k down-droppi

wing'd sea-gul

e he spreads hi

dancing on the

a poet of nature begins, indeed, distinctly to declare itself in this first volume. He differs by it alike from Wordsworth and from Shelley. The instinct of Wordsworth was to interpret all the operations of nature by those of his own strenuous soul; and the imaginative impressions he had received in youth from the scenery of his home, deepened and enriched by continual after meditation, and mingling with all the currents of his adult thought and feeling, constituted for him throughout

ny a min

sound and mount

human mind can read into her with its own workings and aspirations. He had grown up neither like Wordsworth under the spell of lake and mountain, nor in the glow of millennial dreams like Shelley, but London-born and Middlesex-bred, was gifted, we know not whence, as if by some mysterious birthright, with a delighted insight into all the beauties, and sy

mbled in the

kylark shakes t

ush clover

n that To

thy vig

ilion'd, where the

d bee from the f

beauty and half-human faculties. The classical teaching of the Enfield school had not gone beyond Latin, and neither in boyhood nor afterwards did Keats acquire any Greek: but towards the creations of the Greek mythology he was attracted by an overmastering delight in their beauty, and a natural sympathy with the phase of imagination that engendered them. Especially he shows himself possessed and fancy-bound by the mythology, as well as by the physical enchantment, of the moon. Never was bard in youth so literally moonstruck. He had planned a

g her s

d, and with

he blue with

he wonders and beneficences of their bridal night is written in part with such a sympathetic touch for the collective feelings and predicaments of men, in the ordinary cond

ather was so br

ealth were of

··

were etherea

gh half-closed

; it cool'd thei

m into slumbers

lear-ey'd: nor bu

gers, nor with t

p, they met the

iends, nigh fool

ms and breasts, a

cid foreheads pa

s off this tentative exordium of

nnot tell the

ne and thy dear s

poet born? B

pirit must no

curs in this early volume importunately and in many tones; sometimes with words and cadences closely recalling those of Milton

or thee I h

yet a glor

wide he

ing, more confident and dar

spondence! m

know thee, who

are thirsty

am not wealt

isdom: though

of the mighty

ther all the c

o great minister

mysteries o

eiving: yet t

dea befo

ude of an inspiration as yet unrealized and indistinct, gives way in other passages to confid

the work proceeds manifestly from a spontaneous and intense poetic impulse. The matter of these early poems of Keats is as fresh and unconventional as their form, springing directly from the native poignancy of his sensations and abundance of his fancy. That his inexperience should always make the most discreet use of its freedom could not be expected; but with all its immaturity his work has strokes already which suggest comparison with the great names of literature. Who much exceeds him, even from the first, but Shakspere in momentary felicity of touch for nature, and in that charm of morning freshness who but Chaucer? Already, too, we find him showing signs of that capacity for clear and sane self-kno

e so sma

trength of manho

on cannot

t of old? prep

the light, and

s? Has she not

space of ethe

uds unfolding?

eyebrow, to th

ows? here her

isle; and who

oir that lift

to where it

elf of convo

et, and like t

around a d

ays the Muses

; nor had an

ut and soothe

be forgotten?

foppery an

llo blush for

t wise who coul

with a puling

bout upon a r

Pegasus. Ah,

eaven blew, th

waves-ye felt

ernal bosom,

ht collected

recious: Beau

ot awake? But

new not of,-we

lined out with

le; so that ye

oth, inlay, and

certain wands

tallied. Easy

ndicraftsmen

ll-fated, i

the bright Lyr

now it,-no, t

or, decrepit

t flimsy mottoe

of one

whose

r round our p

egated maje

verence, that

names, in this

ommon folk; did

Did our old la

did ye never

on, with a m

did ye whol

ere no more t

tay to give

pirits who cou

way, and die?

ink away thos

rer season; ye

ons o'er us; y

for sweet musi

s; some has b

crystal dwell

on bill; from

quiet in a

fine sounds ar

th: happy are

hat are to paw up against the light? and why paw? Deeds to be done upon clouds by pawing can hardly be other than strange. What sort of a verb is 'I green, thou greenest?' Delight with liberty is very well, but liberty in a poet ought not to include liberties with the parts of speech. Why should the hair of the muses require 'soothing'?-if it were their tempers it would be more intelligible. And surely 'foppery' belongs to civilization and not to 'barbarism': and a standard-bearer may be decrepit, but not a standard, and a standard flimsy, but not a motto. 'Boundly reverence': what is boundly? And so on without end, if we choose to let the mind assume that attitude. Many minds not indifferent to literature were at that time, and some will at all times be, incapable of any other. Such must naturally turn to the work of the eighteenth century school, the school of tact and urbane brilliancy and sedulous execution, and think the only 'blasphemy' was on the side of the y

ntirely absorbed by men of talent or of genius who played with a more careless, and some of them with a more masterly touch than Keats as yet, on commoner chords of the human spirit; as Moore, Scott, and Byron. In Keats's volume every one could see the faults, while the beauties appealed only to the poetically minded. It seems to have had a moderate sale at first, but after the first few weeks none at all. The poet, or at all events his brothers for him, were inclined, apparently with little reason, to blame their friends the publishers for the failure. On the 29th of April we find the

rs are anxious that I should go by myself into the country; they have always been extremely fond of me, and now that Haydon has pointed out how necessary it is that I should be alone to improve myself, they give up the temporary pleasure of living with me