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The Real Tragedy of Keats (A Post-Centenary View)
Author(s): G. R. Elliott
Source: PMLA, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Sep., 1921), pp. 315-331
Published by: Modern Language Association
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PUBLICATIONS
OF THE
Modern Language Association of

1931
VOL. XXXVI, 3 SEPTEMBER, 1921
XIV.-THE REAL TRAGEDY OF KEATS

(A POST-CENTENARY VIEW)
"But the crown

Of all my life was utmost quietude " (Endymion, iii).
Keats' central instinct was for high poetic repose: for

the quietude that comes, not from avoiding life, but from
surmounting it. The goal, however, was so far beyond his
reach that he could not have attained it, I think, even if
he had lived a full lifetime. His early death (February
23, 1821) is bound to lose, as the centuries revolve upon
that day, much of its tragic color; but at the same time
the deeper tragedy of his spirit can appear more distinctly.
This deeper tragedy has been considerably dimmed in the
atmosphere of uniqueness with which the poet has been
invested by the rising admiration of a hundred years. The
other chief poets of the past century are now seen more or
less clearly in their true boundaries; Keats' limits have
been kept uniquely vague. His poetic potentiality and his
ruining fate have been so continually balanced against each
other, with insensible additions now on one side of the
315
316 G. R. ELLIOTT
scale and now on the other, that

much weightier than they rea
has been assumed with extraor
Keats' physical disintegration, b
before his death, stopped his p
proaching a much higher level o
a dispassionate restudy of his la
vinces one that he was approaching, rather, a radical
change in poetic method; a change that was fraught, in his
own clear eyes, with dubious results. His verse had been
less and less adequately fulfilling his growing inner life,
he was feeling insistently for a different mode of self-ex-
pression, and the path of poetry ahead of him seemed
blind. This crisis, more deeply interfused, I think, than
physical weakness, morbid love, and disappointed ambi-
tion, was the source of that accumulating misery of spirit
which pierces us so keenly, after a century, as we review
the succession of his last months. Our sympathy must
deepen when we realize that his own fears for his art were
more than justified: that if he had lived he could not, in
all human probability, have reorganized his poetry with-
out shattering, beyond compensation, its quick-built magic
charm. One hears his spirit's fear of this in many a pre-
monitory passage:
" There was a noise of wings, till in short space

The glowing banquet-room shone with wide-arched grace.
A haunting music, sole perhaps and lone
ISupportress of the faery-roof, made moan
Throughout, as fearful the whole charm might fade."
(Lamia ).
His quick maturity remains wonderful enough when we

cease to regard it as more mysterious than it actually was.
Inexplicable is the fact that John Keats, particularly,
should have been endowed with the most complete poetic
THE REAL TRAGEDY OF KEATS 317
nature of the past century. But it should be clear by now

that the historical conditions in which he found himself,
conditions considerably abnormal, so acted upon his nature
as to bring about an abnormally swift development. In
his career we must recognize something of the forced
growth of the hot-house plant. His nature, early seeking,
like all full poetic natures, for immediate beauty, could
flower out swiftly and lusciously in the superheated atmos-
phere of imagination which encompassed it. Keats took up
into himself the whole imaginative intensity accumulated
in the so-called rise of the Romantic Movement, of which
his work was the climax. If nothing is more wonderful than
his ready transmutation of all external influences, nothing
is more clarifying than a careful study of the shaping
effects exerted upon him by his predecessors, from Chat-
terton and the others down to Hunt and Wordsworth.
The full import of these effects has been blurred by the
emphasis which criticism has thrown upon Keats' affinity
with the Elizabethans. From them, to be sure, he quar-
ried many elements of style; but he scarcely reached the
essential mode of their imagination. One must wonder
how he could be so much penetrated with the beauties of
Spenser and Milton, and so slightly swayed by their total
envisagement of life, unless one realizes that his imagina-
tion was moulded from the very first into the shape of his
own time.
In this connection may be found a solution for a certain
paradox which has beset the interpreters of Keats: he was
sounder than his chief contemporaries as a man among men,
and yet more liable than they to mawkishness of poetic
mood. This duality was not clarified by Matthew Arnold
when he dwelt, disparately, upon the " lusciousness " of
Keats and upon the " flint and iron " of his character. As
318 G. R. ELLIOTT
a matter of fact, neither the lusc

of the poet was so deep-going as i
"Character," with its implicatio
to moral principles, is a mislead
upon Keats. His main motive for living as he did was
artistic. His keen poetic ambition made him shun courses
which might sap his powers and hamper his vocational
success. More deeply, his instinct as a full poetic nature
was for a certain normality that would keep him clear of
individualistic by-ways, and in genial touch with general
human interests. Wordsworthian theorizing and Byronic
conduct seemed in his eyes to lead off from the highway
of poetry. Accordingly that intense pressure of imagina-
tion which pushed the others into strained acts or ideas
could move Keats only in the direction of a strained poetic
style. His lusciousness was far more stylistic, indeed, than
substantial. He strove to load, as he advised Shelley to do,
e every rift with ore." The most apparent metals were
vivid sensations, and he heaped them with "glowing
hand," as Porphyro his feast of fruits. They were not
things growing in his humanity, but things gathered in
haste for the sake of poetry. This impression attaches
most strongly to the mawkish and unreal love-passages
which recur in his verse and which pass over, so to speak,
into his love-letters. Keats did not yet know love, but he
knew that it was golden ore for poetry, and he tried to
catch its hues. The most significant feature of his own
love-story is precisely this, that not till the fall of 1819,
when his best work was over, did love move toward the
center of his life. Before then, he strove quite success-
fully to keep it in the sentimental outskirts. lie adopted
this course partly indeed on practical grounds; but more
deeply because his love threatened to throw his imagination
upon a reality foreign to the kind of verse he was writing.
He tried to submerge below the focus of his imagina-

tion all realities which he could not yet transmute into
beauty. The Letters to his Friends, so frequent in shrewd
observations of actual life and sharp passages of realistic
thinking, might often seem to have been written by another
than the creator of " Isabella " and "Lamia." We see
him continually noting, but segregating so to speak from
his verse, a range of realities which poetry since his time
has wished to grapple with immediately: the actual crav-
ings of sex, the drab conventionalities of social life, the
bloodshed and bitterness of nature, the altered features of
religion and philosophy. The quick tide of romantic ima-
gination on which he and his contemporaries were lifted
could carry him over obtrusive realities to shores where his
lust of beauty could suddenly strike root and come to
flower. Hence the most swift and beautiful fruition which
the history of poetry has so far seen. But it was neces-
sarily brief.
A rift in the poet's aims appeared even in his early days,
and toward the close it widened to a chasm. The best
testimony to the essential greatness of Keats' nature is the
fact that he could not long be satisfied with Keatsian
beauty. He more and more craved for his poetry fullness
of life. At the same time he more and more craved for
his spirit rich sources of quietude. For he felt that to
draw into his verse more of life, external and mental,
would be to shatter his mastery of beauty, unless he could
learn to shape his fresh materials in that spirit of high
repose which he recognized in the greatest poets. Two
ways of advance were possible. One was the way of dra-
matic objectivity. There is no doubt that Keats had more
of the real dramatic attitude than his chief contemporaries.
His sympathy flowed more genially than theirs into stand-
points diverse from the poet's own: the freedom from
320 G. R. ELLIOTT
"self-passion or identity" whic

often quite Shakespearean. His "Endymion," even, is
more dramatic, and his " Tragedy of Otho the Great"
more promising, than critics steeped in lyric atmosphere
have perceived. But Keats was too much of a man of his
age to have found final success in dramatic poetry. The
scale of human values had become too unsettled to permit
of that large certainty of judgment,-at its worst, that
placid mental conventionalism,-which enabled Shaike-
speare to watch the struggling spectacle of life with artis-
tic quietude. Keats' dramatic tendency did not permeate
his constructive imagination. It seems clear from his most
matured pieces, such as " Hyperion " and the " Ode on a
Grecian Urn," that he was moving toward a kind of lyric
and narrative poetry more objective in mood than that of
his contemporaries, but embodying a more or less delib-
erated interpretation of life.
Philosophy, in the most human sense of that now so
frayed term, became increasingly Keats' hope: not pri-
marily from a desire for truth, but from a growing need of
spiritual quiet. His continual feverishness, which ap-
pealed to the nerves of a feverish century, should no longer
blur our recognition of his notable affinity for quietude.
His most memorable attitudes as a personality were re-
poseful. We see him in the presence of the things of
nature that he most loved checking himself into intense
silence; or sitting motionless with book in hand, "like a
picture of somebody reading"; or moving in society with
an attitude, predominantly, of quiet geniality. Probably
his fits of animation were often his impressible nature's
surface-reactions to the voluble artistic company into
which he had been drawn. To the loud Haydon, that re-
edited Bottam, he seemed socially inept; and one remem-
bers that in 1818 he began to seclude himself from the
noisy London crew. In his poetry, full images of stillness

haunt us, from the closing lines of the Sonnet on " Chap-
man's Homer", and the extraordinary "Cave of Quietude"
in " Endymion", down to the opening passage of " Hy-
perion," and the " Ode on a Grecian Urn." From this
side of his nature emanated his remarkable moon-worship.
His most persistent devotion was to the "gentlier-might-
iest " Diana, with her intensely quiet radiance. It is note-
worthy that his young Apollo in " Hyperion " seems more
captivated by " the most patient brilliance of the moon "
than by the glory of the sun which he is destined to rule.
Not he but his serener sister was the presiding spirit of
Keats' poetry; and the philosophic hue which that spirit
assumed toward the close of " Endymion " was prophetic
of his later mental ambition.
Nothing is more significant in the Letters than the defin-
itive alteration, within three years, of Keats' attitude to
philosophy. Critics have liked to quote his immaturer
doctrines as though characteristic of his final thought. Sir
Sidney Colvin in closing his extensive biography remarks
of present day verse: " The new poetry may not be able
fully to share Keats's inspiring conviction of the sovereign,
the transcendental truth of whatsoever ideas the imagina-
tion seizes as beauty. It may perhaps even abjure the
direct search for beauty as its primary aim and impulse."
But it is to be noted that Keats himself, though he never
abjured that " primary aim and impulse," became less pre-
occupied with it. His mind grew far beyond his early
doctrine that "What the Imagination seizes as Beauty
must be Truth," in spite of the late echo of it in the
"Ode on a Grecian Urn." This doctrine was in one and
the same context with the boyish cry, " 0 for a life of
Sensations rather than of Thoughts" (Nov. 22, 1817).
Sixteen months later Keats thinks that poetry may be
822 G. R. ELLIOTT
" not so fine a thing as philosophy-for the same reason

that an eagle is not so fine a thing as a truth." For in
the meantime he has come to the following opinion of
himself, from which misleading excerpts have so often
been taken that it should now be quoted in full: " I know
nothing, I have read nothing, and I mean to follow Solo-
mon's directions 'Get learning, get understanding.' I
find earlier days are gone by; I find that I can have no
enjoyment in the world but continual drinking of knowl-
edge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of
doing some good for the world. Some do it with their
society, some with their wit, some with their benevolence,
some with a sort of power of conferring pleasure and good-
humour on all they meet, and in a thousand ways, all
dutiful to the command of great Nature. There is but one
way for me. The road lies through application, study,
and thought. I will pursue it; and for that end, purpose
retiring for some years. I have been hovering for some
time between an exquisite sense of the luxurious, and a love
for philosophy; were I calculated for the former, I shoulld
be glad. But as I am not, I shall turn all my soul to the
latter" (April 24, 1818).
The fact is that the younger Keats, intent on immediate
beauty, took over into the " chameleon " surface of his
nature the one-sided doctrine of the imagination which was
current among his contemporaries. But his deeper nature,
demanding a poetic completeness which they lacked, im-
pelled him toward a mental adjustment. That his " love
for philosophy," as he termed it, tended at times to be as
inconsiderate as the doctrine from which he was uncon-
sciously reacting, appears in the passage quoted above andl
in later letters, as when we find him preparing to ask
Hazlitt for " the best metaphysical road I can take." But
his central desire was for more life and for the larger
serenity of spirit which would enable hi

that more of life into beauty. The e
beauty was being threatened by inrup
the following:
" The rocks were silent, the wide sea did weave
An untumultuous fringe of silver foam
Along the flat brown sand; I was at home
And should have been most happy,-but I saw
Too far into the sea, where every maw
The greater on the less feeds evermore,-
But I saw too distinct into the core
Of an eternal fierce destruction,
And so from happiness I far was gone."
His glance passes lucidly from the outer to the inner source
of his unhappiness:
" Things cannot to the will
Be settled, but they tease us out of thought;
Or is it that imagination brought
Beyond its proper bound, yet still confined,
Lost in a sort of Purgatory blind,
Cannot refer to any standard law
Of either earth or heaven? It is a flaw
In happiness, to see beyond our bourn,-
It forces us in summer skies to mourn,
It spoils the singing of the Nightingale" (March 25, 1818).
Reaching beyond the present " bourn" of his verse, he

wanted for his imagination a guidance which itself could
not supply. A few weeks later he remarks that " extensive
knowledge " with " widening speculation " can take away
" the heat and fever." High poetic repose was his goal.
His prayer to Apollo, uttered on the threshold of the brief
period of his best work, sounds a motif that was iterated
with deepening poignancy, on to the end:
" God of Song,
Thou bearest me along
Through sights I scarce can bear:
0 let me, let me share
324 G. R. ELLIOTT
With the hot lyre and thee,

The staid Philosophy.
Temper my lonely hours,
And let me see thy bowers
More unalarmed" (Jan. 31, 1818).
His mental reachings for this far goal began to weaken

his hold on the immediate poetic beauty which he had so
swiftly mastered. His thought was diverging from his
imagination. This condition became acute in his last work-
ing months, October and November of 1819; and it ac-
counts for the anomalous nature of the revised version of
" Hyperion." The apologistic view of this poem and of
its author's state, fails to cover the facts, and in effect it
depreciates the character it was intended to elevate. The
facts do not warrant the assumption that Keats' physical
weakness had thus early become so great as to render him
the helpless prey of his passion for Miss Brawne; and
that, under more fortunate circumstances, his poetic power
would not have declined. The truth of the matter seems
to be just the other way around. If his poetic power had
remained at full tide, it would have continued to keep him
above his troubles. He would still have tried to segregate
his morbid passion from his active being, as he had done
very signally during the preceding months, when he was
writing his last great poems. He would have continued
to guard his frail health for the sake of poetry, instead of
so neglecting it as to open the way for the decisive illness
of February 3, 1820. His closest observer, Charles Brown,
put the matter in its true sequence when he recorded:
"He was too thoughtful, or too unquiet; and he began
to be reckless of health." But the deep source of his dis-
quietude, the division in his poetic nature, was of the kind
that cannot be fathomed by friends, nor be fully clear to
the sufferer himself. It is natural that Keats, as well as
his friends, should have been apt to seize upon tangible

and superficial factors, in attempting to account for his
inner disintegration. Therefore the biographic material
for this dark period, even if it were not so scanty, could not
possibly be so illuminating as the two long fragments, the
revised " Hyperion " and " The Cap and Bells," in which
the poet's state is given less consciously and more faith-
fully. These two pieces, so opposite in nature and yet
composed concurrently day by day, shadow out the sharp
duality of his spiritual condition.
The recast " Hyperion " shows Keats reaching anxiously
for philosophic truth, and stultifying his poetic perception.
"The Cap and Bells" shows him pulled in the other
direction by his instinct for immediate artistic effect; and
indeed the continued strength of this instinct appears in
several ways, during the last eighteen months of his life.
It made him project further romantic tales which he hoped
would surpass his earlier ones. But that he could never
have recaptured their fine gusto is suggested by his very
deliberation of the matter: " As the marvellous is the most
enticing, and the surest guarantee of harmonious numbers,
I have been endeavouring to persuade myself to untether
Fancy, and to let her manage for herself. I and myself
cannot agree about this at all." (Nov. 17, 1819). His
mental aloofness from romantic story had become defini-
tive. The romantico-satiric method of " The Cap and
Bells," so far from being merely an amazing lapse occa-
sioned by external factors and a passing mood, is a natural
development of the state of mind which was forming be-
hind the scenes of " Lamia." Though Keats had lived
on, " Lamia " must have remained, I think, his last great
romance. Its marked deliberation, in contrast to the mood
of the earlier " Isabella " and " Eve of St. Agnes," passes
sometimes into factitiousness. And its deepest emotional
326 G. R. ELLIOTT
tone, as suggested by the passag

is elegiac of Ieatsian beauty, and
ing change. It is the rising trage
that comes out into the question
of the lovely serpent-woman und
" Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy? "
Even while shrinking from thought's chill cast, he was

longing for its elevation. And he was approaching that
opinion of his loveliest poems which appears in the well-
known sentence: " I have done nothing-except for the
amusement of a few people who refine upon their feelings
till anything in the understandable way will go down with
them, people predisposed for sentiment " (Oct. 3, 1819).
This profound pessimism is fully intelligible only as an
exhalation from the real incompetency which had now
come over his creative power on account of the division in
his spirit; as is suggested, indeed, by another sentence in
context with the one just quoted: " Though at this present
'I have great dispositions to write,' I feel every day more
and more content to read." To go into retirement for the
sake of reading and thought, though at the expense of
composition, was his iterated purpose: he knew that his
muse was still far from ripe for high philosophy. But at
the same time he had " great dispositions to write," as he
puts it, with a depth of pathos beneath the light phrase.
A natural outcome of this double mood was the reconstruc-
tion of "iHyperion." It was a violent and hapless at-
tempt, but for Keats a vitally necessary attempt, to bridge
the widening rift between his thought and his verse. In
this view the symbolism of the poem becomes clearer. In
the visionary temple, the marble pavement with its creep-
ing cold is plainly an adumbration of the numbness, the
loss of " poetic ardour and fire " menti

this period (Sept. 21, 1819), which had
creative genius in its present ambigu
had been sated with the sensuous mod
ized by the " feast of summer fruits "
the poem. He was now facing the dif
poetry of higher outlook,-the arduous s
shrine in the temple,-as the great wa
the state of cold unproductiveness in
himself:
"I strove hard to escape

The numbness, strove to gain the lowest step.
Slow, heavy, deadly was my pace: the cold
/Grew stifling, suffocating at the heart;
And when I clasped my hands I felt them not.
One minute before death my iced foot touched
The lowest stair ..."
Surely these words came, though unconsciously,

innermost heart of his bitter experience.
The kind of philosophy that his deepest natu
for was far beyond his reach. He could not be
with the specialistic theories which contemporar
was hatching on, or out of, the debris of the
refuses to be one who will " brood and peacock "
own speculations " till he makes a false coinag
ceives himself "; he shrinks from " poetry that h
pable design upon us," and desires the kind that i
and unobtrusive " (Febr. 3, 1818). His critiques of
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and the rest are less signi-
ficant for their mental and moral lucidities, which de-
lighted Arnold, than for their underlying vague instinct
for the full quality of poetic thought. Keats did not see
clearly, for example, the untruth of emotional pantheism:
that conception of a single spiritual life rolling through
328 c. R. ELLIOTT
all things, by which Wordsworth and Shelley, and even the

clearer-sighted Byron at his Lake Leman, sought to fill
the widening gap between men and external nature. Keats
did not criticize their hypostasis of yearning emotion;
but, even though more warmly intimate than they in his
love of nature, he avoided it: undoubtedly because he felt
it to be a channel divergent from the full course of poetic
thinking. He longed more poignalntly than Wordsworth
for " the quietness of thought "; but his nature would not
allow him to win the quietude, as Wordsworth did, by
averting his mind from " half of human fate." ie craved
without knowing it a philosophy of Goethean quality: a
view of life which, while meeting nineteenth century con-
ditions, would be so complete and satisfying as to be fully
soluble in serene beauty.
The road ahead of him was very long; and the obstacles
in it were more formidable than his own view of them,
remarkably realistic as it often was, could comprehend:
the inadequacy of his associates, the superficiality of his
understanding of the English classics, his ignorance of
foreign thought. No doubt if he had lived he would have
faced these obstacles more consistently. He would have
extended the winding efforts, so notable in his later letters,
to see life steadily and whole. His verse would have en-
tered upon a long period of partial stagnation and painful
experiment, at times trying unsuccessfully to recover its
first fine rapture, but mainly continuing the endeavor of
the revised " Hyperion " for a mode more philosophic.
Could Keats have come through this struggle triumphantly?
Looking ahead to it, while composing " Lamia," he thinks
he could sustain it if only he had " a free and healthy and
lasting organization of heart, and lungs as strong as an
ox,s, so as to be able to bear unhurt the shock of extreme
thought and sensation." But he adds: " I feel my body
too weak to support me to the height, I ani continually

obliged to check myself, and be nothing." With a body
not merely saved from death but renovated, and supposing
that his own fitful confidence in his poetic and mental
possibilities was justified, he could have followed the path
on " to the height." But the premises are too hypothetic.
Proceeding from all the known conditions, I cannot con-
ceive a matured Keats writing a kind of poetry not only
more intellectual, but more highly and distinctively beau-
tiful, than the poetry of him who remains for us ever
young. Keats' genius was conditioned by an age in which
poetic power rose early and sank very soon. And the very
fullness of his nature, which could have prevented such
sterility as overtook Wordsworth at the age of forty,
became at the age of twenty-five the means of his disinte-
gration. For it swiftly developed needs far larger than his
powers could fulfil. His decline in the fall of 1819 was not
accidental but real. A deep tragedy of his spirit precedes
the pathos of his early death.
In this view of Keats we can understand, more fully
than before, the growing preoccupation of his spirit, in the
period of his best achievement, with the thought of death.
In one of his few optimistic moments, at the close of that
period, we find him looking forward to " a more thoughtful
and quiet power . . . I want to compose without this
fever " (Sept. 21, 1819). But deeper and more insistent
in his spirit, throughout his career, was the intimation
that the fullness of quiet he craved was not to be had from
life. His mind turned continually to the subject of death.
His mind, rather than his heart; for though doubtless there
appears in Keats' case something of the familiar swinging
of the emotionalist from a thirst for too much life to a
thirst for no-life, and back again, his main approach to
the subject of death was through a region above precipitate
330 G. R. ELLIOTT
desires. This appears in his own remarkable account of

the composition of the pathetic sonnet " Why did I laugh
to-night ?", which closes on the note of death. " Though
the first steps to it were through my human passions", he
says, " they went away and I wrote with my mind". He
had been brooding on the rarity of unselfishness among
men, on the brutality of nature, on " the violence of my
temperament continually smothered down." Longing for
light upon all this darkness, he had realized with " agony",
he says, how far he was from the goal of " divine philos-
ophy", and had come to the conviction that though
"My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads:
Yet could I on this very midnight cease,
And the world's gaudy ensigns see in shreds;
Verse, fame and beauty are intense indeed
But death intenser-Death is Life's high meed"
(March 19, 1819).
Not satisfied with the "utmost blisses" of fancy, dis-

traught by those dark actualities which his veracity made
him face, and yet needing high repose of spirit for the
full fruition of his poetic genius, he sought the peace of
wisdom: but this being too far from him, his spirit leaned
toward the stillness of death. Such is the spiritual process
that underlies Keats' poetry of death considered as a
whole, and draws into a symphony its successive tones,-
from early passages such as:
"But this is human life: the war, the deeds,
The disappointment, the anxiety,
Imagination's struggles, far and nigh,
All human; bearing in themselves this good,
That they are still the air, the subtle food,
To make us feel existence, and to show
How quiet death is " (Endymion, II);
down to the massive atmosphere of deathly stillness which

is the most distinctive feature, I think, of the revised
" iyperion ":
" Without stay or prop

But my own weak mortality, I bore
The load of this eternal quietude .
. .....Oftentimes I prayed
Intense, that death would take me from the vale
And all its burthens."
Though Keats could not find an articulate communion

with high truth, he could feel the stillness of her presence,
which is somewhat akin to the stillness of death. But his
loveliest tone is pitched somewhat lower than that. It
comes when, without taking his eye from the earthly object
he loves so well, he draws back from it into a sort of intense
brooding quietude, and suggests in his music a yearning
for a peace which in life he could not win:
"Heard melodies are sweet, buit those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone."
G. R. ELLIOTT.

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The Real Tragedy of Keats (A Post-Centenary View)

Modern Language Association of

VOL. XXXVI, 3 SEPTEMBER, 1921

XIV.-THE REAL TRAGEDY OF KEATS

"But the crown

Keats' central instinct was for high poetic repose: for

scale and now on the other, that

" There was a noise of wings, till in short space

His quick maturity remains wonderful enough when we

nature of the past century. But it should be clear by now

a matter of fact, neither the lusc

He tried to submerge below the focus of his imagina-

"self-passion or identity" whic

noisy London crew. In his poetry, full images of stillness

" not so fine a thing as philosophy-for the same reason

serenity of spirit which would enable hi

Reaching beyond the present " bourn" of his verse, he

With the hot lyre and thee,

His mental reachings for this far goal began to weaken

his friends, should have been apt to seize upon tangible

tone, as suggested by the passag

Even while shrinking from thought's chill cast, he was

loss of " poetic ardour and fire " menti

"I strove hard to escape

Surely these words came, though unconsciously,

all things, by which Wordsworth and Shelley, and even the

too weak to support me to the height, I ani continually

desires. This appears in his own remarkable account of

Not satisfied with the "utmost blisses" of fancy, dis-

down to the massive atmosphere of deathly stillness which

" Without stay or prop

Though Keats could not find an articulate communion

"Heard melodies are sweet, buit those unheard

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