John Keats as a Critic

Author(s): Irving H. White

Source: The Sewanee Review , Oct. - Dec., 1926, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1926), pp. 451-
465
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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 JOHN KEATS AS A CRITIC
If, as Wordsworth suggested in Tintern Abbey, there are four
stages of a man's development?sensation, feeling, love of man,
and love of God?John Keats never got beyond the second. He
himself recognized this fact and noted it in a letter to Reynolds.1
Yet we should consider Keat as a poet, not by what he might
Aave done had he lived, but rather by what he did do in the three
years of his poetical activity; his fame rests most firmly on what
he actually accomplished.
His development as a poet was slow until his art suddenly, in
the course of a few years, shot forth into its maturity. Like
Robert Louis Stevenson, Keats, through the imitation of some
beloved masters, became the great poet that he is. He was also
stimulated by his ambition to "be among the English Poets after
[his] death." But, most significantly, in him, more than in most
poets, the poetical and critical faculties were almost equally united.
"I have no doubt of success in a course of years if I persevere,"
he wrote, "but it must be patience, for the Reviews have ener
vated and made indolent men's minds?few think for themselves."2
Keats developed his critical powers by thinking for himself.
Yet one rarely hears any reference to him as a critic. It will be
the purpose of this essay to formulate as far as possible Keats's
theory of poetry and to give his criticism of his own poems,
incidentally pointing out his appreciation of the three great poets
of the past who most influenced him: Spenser, Shakespeare,
and Milton. It is quite possible to give a full account of his
reactions to them and to the work of his own contemporaries (par
ticularly of Wordsworth) as indicated in his annotated copies, in
his formal dramatic criticisms, in his letters, and in his own poetry,
but the scope of this paper will not permit ; only a few points will
be noted in passing.
II
Fortunate indeed are we to have copies of Keats's favorite
poets in which he has marked passages that particularly appealed
to him: Miss Amy Lowell, for instance, possessed his annotated

xSidney Colvin, Letters of John Keats, 1921, pp. 107-109.

'Ibid, p. 171.

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452 The Sewanee Review

copy of the first book of the Faerie Que ene. No one will deny
the great influence of Spenser on Keats, especially in the young
man's first volume of poetry ; Miss Lowell in her biography gave
a most interesting account of Cowden Clarke's introducing Keats
to Spenser. Keats showed his own instinct for the poetical art
by fastening with fine discernment on epithets of special felicity
or power in Spenser. For instance, says Cowden Clarke, "he
hoisted himself up, and looked burly and dominant, as he said,
'What an image that is?sea-shouldering-whalesl' " Passages in
Keats's copy of the Faerie Queene are marked and re-marked by
Keats, indicating clearly his early preoccupation with descrip
tions appealing to one or .more of the senses?with "images of
effect," as Miss Lowell calls them. The 1817 volume of Poems
shows an enormous effect of his reading and assimilation of Spen
ser ; and in his sonnet on the "poets' poet," he says :
The flower must drink the nature of the soil
Before it can put forth its blossoming:
Be with me in the summer days and I
Will for thine honour and his pleasure try.

As late as April, 1819, he says that he is still deliberately imitating

Spenser; and, when he is ill and is no longer able to compose
poetry himself, we find him writing to Fanny Brawne: "For this
Week I have been employed in marking the most beautiful pas
sages in Spenser, intending it for you. . . ." From his study
of Spenser, he learned much; his perfect melody, his rare sense
of natural beauty, his splendid imagination, his lofty moral purity
and seriousness, and his delicate idealism, which could make all
nature and every common thing beautiful. Even more than these,
it kindled the spark and set afire his love for the poetry of the
greatest of the Elizabethans.
Articles, theses, books, have been written on the influence of
Shakespeare on Keats; among them, Claude Lee Finney's Har
vard thesis, Shakspere and Keats, and J. Middleton Murry's
Keats and Shakspere. Keats was inspired and, at times, haunted
by his reading of Shakespeare, few of his letters do not contain
some allusion to or imitative paraphrase of Shakespeare. "We
feel," he says in one of them, "that criticism has no right* to purse
its little brow in the presence of Shakespeare. He has, to our
belief, very few imperfections and perhaps these might vanish from

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 John Keats as a Critic 453

our minds, if we had the perfection properly to scan them."

Largely intuitive, his criticism is very acute when he says of the
sonnets :3
One of the three books I have with me is Shakspeare's
Poems ; I never found so many beauties in the sonnets?they
seem to be full of fine things said unintentionally?in the in
tensity of working out conceits?He has left nothing to say
about nothing or anything.

In his criticism of Kean as an actor of Shakespearean tragedy, par

ticularly in the r?le of Richard the Third, and in his annotations
in his 1808 folio copy of Shakespeare, Keats is the roimantic ap
preciative or impressionistic critic.
Now, Keats loved Shakespeare most because the latter pos
sessed, in his opinion, the greatest "negative capability, that is,
when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts,
without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,"4?the very
characteristic about Shakespeare that Bernard Shaw deplores.
But this quality isolated Shakespeare for Keats ; Shakespeare stood
alone and above all other poets. In one of his dramatic reviews,
Keats said :
One thing we are convinced of on looking over the three
parts of Henry . . . which is that Shakspeare was the only
lonely and perfectly happy creature whom God ever formed.
He could never have made a being more unmatchable.

As great as was Hazlitt's influence as a critic upon Keats (espe

cially in Keats's criticisms and annotations of King Lear5), at
times the young poet surpasses him, particularly in the profound
statement he makes concerning Shakespeare's universality. Con
cerning a certain passage in Troilus and Cressida, Keats notes :
The genius of Shakspeare was an innate universality?
wherefore he had the utmost achievement of human intellect
prostrate beneath his indolent and kingly gaze. He could
do easily man's utmost. His plans of tasks to come were not
of this world?if what he purposed to do hereafter would
not in his own idea "answer the aim," how tremendous must
have been his conception of ultimates.
"Letter XXIII, pp. 45-46, to Reynolds, November 22, 1817.
4Letter XXIV, p. 48, December 22, 1817, to George and Thomas Keats.
BFinney, p. 271ff.

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454 The Sewanee Review

While Milton's verse affected Keats to a considerable extent6

(particularly in his composition of Hyperion), yet it was less
powerful to him than the poetry of Shakespeare and of Spenser.
His letters, however, contain numerous quotations and references
to Milton's poetry.7 His first reference to Milton in his own
verse is in the Epistle to Charles Cowden Clarke, in which he con
trasts the poetry of Spenser and of Milton.8 A careful considera
tion of the marginalia of Keats's copy of Paradise Lost will, I
believe, indicate three things in which Keats was particularly in
terested: first, the immensity of Milton's undertaking; second,
his method of contrast; and, third, his use of sensuous language.9
Towards the end of his career, Keats, however, abandoned the
verse of Paradise Lost as too Miltonic and returned to Shakes
peare.10
In summary, we may now say that Keats was interested in and
imitated deliberately the three great English poets before him
because of the qualities of their poetry that directly appealed to
him: Spenser's medieval romantic chivalry, his sensitiveness to
natural beauty, and the flowing melody and rhythm of his verse ;
Shakespeare's sensuous qualities and his superb management of
the passions; and Milton's harmony and sublimity. Of his con
temporaries, Keats most admired Wordsworth, Haydon, and
Hazlitt. To Haydon, in January, 1818, he wrote :n
. . . Every day the older I get?the greater is my idea of
your achievements in Art : and I am convinced that there are
three things to rejoice at in this Age: The Excursion, your
Pictures, and Hazlitt's depth of Taste.

In his appreciation of these poets, particularly Spenser, Shakes

peare, Milton, and Wordsworth, Keats built up a theory of poetry
for himself.
Ill
If Keats was a good critic of others, he was a better critic of
himself. I shall consider, first, Keats's theory of poetry; and,
second, his application of these principles to his own work. I
6Cf. Lines on Seeing a Lock of Milton's Hair, Oxford Keats, pp. 301-2.
1 Letters XXI, p. 41f ; XCII, 237;CXII, 282; CXVI, 313-14.
8Oxford Keats, p. 31, lines 56-59.
*Lord Houghton, Life of Keats, etc., 1867, pp. 235-40.
"Letter CXXI, p. 282, August 25, 1819.
"Letter XXVI, p. 53, January 10, 1818, to Haydon.

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 John Keats as a Critic 455

regret that time will not permit my treating, even briefly, Keats's
method of composition.12 Unlike Wordsworth and Coleridge,
Keats does not write a formal or prefatory essay on the theory of
poetry, but scattered throughout his letters and his poetry are
clear-cut statements as to what he conceived to be his task as a
poet. Let us take up in order Keats's consideration of such poeti
cal fundamentals as the "negative capability" (as he calls the
greatest of all poetic requisites), beauty, imagination, and sensa
tion.
We have seen, in one of Keats's comments on Shakespeare, that
the quality that is most essential for a man of achievement, espe
cially in literature, is negative capability ; a quality which Shakes
peare possessed "enormously," making him, for Keats, the great
est of all poets; while Coleridge lacked it, to his detriment as a
poet.13 Pbetry must be impersonal, and as far as the poet is con
cerned, he should have no identity.14 For "men of genius are
great as certain ethereal chemicals operating on the mass of neutral
intellect-?but they have not any individuality, any determined
character?I would call the top and head of those who have a
proper self, men of power."15 "We hate poetry that has a palpa
ble design upon us. . . . Poetry should be great and unobtrusive,
a thing that enters into one's soul, and does not startle or amaze
it with itself?but with its subject."16 But this does not mean
that poetry itself is purposeless; for Keats is ambitious of doing
the world good through his poetry. He will strive to reach as
high a summit as he is capable of, but he has fears that he may
lose all interest in human affairs?"that the solitary Indifference I
feel for applause, even from the finest spirits, will not blunt any
acuteness of vision I may have."
In summarizing what he means by negative capability, Keats
quickly shifts to his theory of beauty. "This [consideration of
negative capability] pursued through volumes would perhaps take
us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty

"Cf. particularly Letter of Woodhouse, Lowell MS., Lowell, I, pp. 501-2.

Is there not plenty of evidence in the first drafts of many of Keats's poems,
that Woodhouse is mistaken when he says that Keats never revised, never
changed, never rewrote?
"Letter XXIV, p. 48.
"Letter LXXVI, pp. 184-85.
15Letter XXII p. 41.
"Letter XXXIV, p. 68. Letter LXXVI, pp. 184-85.

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456 The Sewanee Review

overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all con

sideration."17 He worships at the shrine of beauty. "I have not the
slightest feeling of humility toward the public?or to anything in
existence,?but the eternal Being, the Principle of Beauty. . . ."18
And beauty is the very heart and soul of poetry.

Beauty is its own excuse for being,

and
all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy.19

In Sleep and Poetry (1817), Keats emphasized the fact that the
field of poetry is not reason and philosophy: its field is the free
play of the imagination, and its aim is the creation of beauty.20
Keats, in his consideration of the imagination, again, unlike
Wordsworth and Coleridge, does not attempt to distinguish be
tween imagination and fancy, but impressionistically writes to his
friend Bailey:21
I long to be talking about the imagination. ... I am certain
of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections, and
the truth of Imagination. What.the Imagination seizes as
Beauty must be truth?whether it existed before or not,?
for I have the same idea of all our passions as of Love : they
are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty. In a
Word, you may know my favourite speculation by my first
Book [Endymion] . . . The Imagination may be compared
to Adam's dream,?he awoke and found it truth :?I am more
zealous in this affair, because I have never yet been able to
perceive how anything can be known for truth by consecutive
reasoning?and yet it must be. . . . However it may be, O
for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts !

By sensations Keats means "the direct intuitions of the imagi

nation."22 Keats's often quoted exclamation, "O for a life of
sensations rather than of Thoughts!" when considered out of its
context is misleading. As is obvious from the quotation given
above, it enter into Keats's discussion of the imagination. Fur
"Letter XXIV, p. 48.
"Letter XLVIII, p. 96.
"Lamia, lines 229ff.
^Oxford Keats, Sleep and Poetry, lines 162-229, pp. 47-49.
"Letter XXII, p. 41f, to Benjamin Bailey, November 22, 1817.
"Colvin, p. 266.

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 John Keats as a Critic 457

thermore, there is what he calls high sensation with and without

extensive knowledge, the former being needful to thinking people :
it takes away the heat and fever.23
In that famous "mansion" passage in his letter of May 3, 1818,
to his friend Reynolds, Keats gives much pertinent criticism not
only of Milton and Wordsworth, but also of himself. Human life,
he says, is comparable to a large mansion of many apartments : the
first is the Infant or Thoughtless Chamber, and the second is the
Chamber of Maiden Thought which becomes darkened by misery,
heart-break, pain, sickness, and oppression:24
Thought becomes gradually darkened, and at the same time,
on all sides of it, many doors are set open?but all dark?all
leading to dark passages?We see not the balance of good and
evil?we are in a mist?we are now in that states?We feel
the "burden of the Mystery." To this point was Words
worth come, as far as I can conceive, when he wrote "Tintern
Abbey," and it seems to me that his Genius is explorative of
those dark Passages. Now, if we live, and go on thinking,
we too shall explore them?He is a genius and superior to us,
in so far as he can, more than we, make discoveries and shed
a light in them.

It seems to me from a very careful reading of Keats's poetry that,

as he realized in this letter, he might have been very near the third
of the fourth stages enumerated in Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey,
and probably most closely approached it in the Fall of Hyperion,
but he was still groping in the "dark passages."
Before the publication of Endymion, Keats wrote his publisher,
enumerating three axioms in poetry, and regretting the fact that
his Endymion falls far short of his principles.25
1st. I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not
by singularity ; it should strike the reader as a wording of his
own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
"Letter LU, p. 104, to J. H. Reynolds, May 3, 1818. It cannot be denied,
however, that Keats was a highly sensuous person and that most of his
poetry makes a direct appeal to the senses. One of Keats's most recent
critics thinks that there is detectable in his poetry a development of a con
scious moral theory. This may be seen to some extent in the revision of
Hyperion, but in some of his odes which were also of this later period,
Keats's interest is emphatically centered on sensuous beauty.
^Letter LII, pp. 107-09, to J. H. Reynolds, May 3, 1818.
"Letter XXXIX, p. 77t to John Taylor, February 27, 1818.

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458 The Sewanee Review

2nd. Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby

making the reader breathless, instead of content. The rise,
the progress, the setting of imagery should, like the sun, come
natural to him, shine over him, and set soberly, although in
magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of twilight. But it
is easier to think what poetry should be, than to write it?
And this leads me to
Another axiom?That if poetry comes not as naturally as the
leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.

Here we have a good summary of Keats's scattered remarks on

various poetic principles,?the negative capability, beauty, imagi
nation, and sensation,?and these are particularly applicable to the
poet's own work.
IV
Now for Keats's comments on his own poetry. One thing that
particularly impresses one in reading his letters is the indifference
with which he embodies some of his most beautiful poems in these
letters, without the least comment. But this attitude did not indi
cate a lack of apprehension on his part of their shortcomings. He
realized more than any one else his deficiencies:26
Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose
love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic of his
own Works. My own domestic criticism has given me pain
without comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly
could possibly inflict?and also when I feel I am right, no
external praise can give me such a glow as my own solitary
reperception and ratification of what is fine.

Keats struck the keynote of his verse in the 1817 volume in the
motto from Spenser prefixed to it :
What more felicity can fall to creature
Than to enjoy delight with liberty?

In the poetry found in this little volume there are liberty, restraint
from all classical rules, and an enthusiastic outpouring of the
delight in nature, in romance, in friendship, and in poesy. As far
as he is able to do so, he is carrying out his poetic theories with
reference to beauty, imagination, and sensation. In this volume
his attempts are always immature, and at times crude, but he
^Letter LXXII, p. 167, to James August Hessey, October 9, 1818.

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 John Keats as a Critic 459

knows his rules, and he is trying to apply them. Many of these

poems, particularly Sleep and Poetry, are made to embody declara
tions of his literary beliefs.27
Keats wrote two prefaces for Endymion, while, in fact, he de
sired to write none at all. The first?a very frank and truthful
statement on the part of Keats ; too much so, in fact, to have ap
pealed to the public?was discarded, as it was unanimously con
demned by the young poet's friends. In the first draft Keats
wrote :28
So this Poem must rather be considered as an endeavour than
a thing accomplished; a poor prologue to what, if I live, I
humbly hope to do. In duty to the Public I should have
kept it back for a year or two, knowing it to be so faulty:
but I really cannot do so,?by repetition my favourite pas
sages sound vapid in my ears, and I would rather redeem
myself with a new Poem should this one be found of any
interest. . . .
... I have written to please myself, and in hopes to please
others, and for a love of fame; if I neither please myself,
nor others, nor get fame, of what consequence is Phraseol
ogy? . . .

With great reluctance Keats prepared a second Preface, which

is almost as na?ve as the first with reference to admitted failures
and deficiencies of Endymion. These were immediately seized
upon by the reviewers, and malignantly hurled back at the young
poet. In this Preface, Keats admits that the poem exhibits "in
experience, immaturity . . . and a feverish attempt, rather than a
deed accomplished" on the part of the author.29 He would delay
publication and revise, but the "foundations are too sandy." He
intends, however, to plod on, and finally write verses "fit to live."
He attributes the "mawkishness" of Endymion to his immaturity.
After its publication, however, he was all the more convinced of
his immaturity, but it was the best he could do at the time :30

^Oxford Keats, pp. 47-49, lines 161-229 ; Cf. also Epistle to C. C. Clarke,
p. 31, lines 55-59; Epistle to George Keats, p. 27 ; Epistle to G. F. Matthew,
p. 24ff.
"Lowell, I, p. 607.
"Oxford Keats, p. 56.
^Letter LXXII, pp. 167-68, to James Hessey, October 9, 1818.

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460 The Sewanee Reviezv

J. S.31 is perfectly right in regard to the slip-shod Endymion.

That it is so is no fault of mine. No !?though it may sound
a little paradoxical. It is as good as I had power to make it
?by myself?Had I been nervous about its being a perfect
piece, and with that view asked advice, and trembled over
every page, it would not have been written; for it is not in
my nature to fumble?I will write independently ... I have
written independently without Judgment. I may write in
dependently, and with Judgment, hereafter. The Genius of
Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man : It cannot
be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watch
fulness in itself?That which is creative must create itself?
In Endymion, I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby
have become better acquainted with the Soundings, the quick
sands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green
shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable
advice. I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner
fail than not be among the greatest.

A few months before his death, in writing Shelley concerning the

latter's The Cenci, Keats refers to himself as the "writer of Endy
mion whose mind was like a pack of scattered cards."32
While there are clear indications of progress in Keats's poetic
technique in Endymion, yet he is still consciously following his
rules?there is his delight in the freedom of the expression of the
imaginations and sensuous beauty. Of Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of
St. Agnes and Other Poems, published in 1820, Keats has very
little to say, although this volume undoubtedly contains some of his
best poetry. Of Lamia, which some critics consider magnificent
for its inventive descriptions and which others think the finest of
his longer poems, Keats said :33
I have been reading over a part of a short poem I have com
posed lately, called Lamia, and I am certain there is that sort
of fire in it that must take hold of people some way. Give
them either pleasant or unpleasant sensation?what they want
is a sensation of some sort. . . .

^Referring to these words in John Scott's letter in his defence, Morning

Chronicle, October 3, 1818 : "That there are also many, very many passages
indicating both haste and carelessness I will not deny ; nay, I will go further,
and assert that a real friend of the author would have dissuaded him from
immediate publication."
?'Letter CLV, p. 366.
"Letter CXVI, p. 294.

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 John Keats as a Critic 461

According to Woodhouse, Keats thought that the many triplets

and alexandrines in Lamia were in character with the language
and sentiment in those particular parts.34
Isabella, wrote Woodhouse, appeared to Keats as "mawkish."
Taylor also recounts Keats's dislike for the poem. A letter of
Keats to Woodhouse gives the poet's reasons for his dislike for
Isabella.35
I will give a few reasons why I shall persist in not publishing
The Pot of Basil. It is too smokeable. I can get it smoak'd
at the Carpenters shaving chimney much more cheaply. There
is too much inexperience of line, and simplicity of knowledge
in it?which might do very well after one's death, but not
while one is alive. . . . Isabella is what I should call were I
a reviewer "A weak-sided Poem" with an amusing sober
sadness about it . . . this will not do for the public. If I
may so say, in my dramatic capacity I enter fully into the
feeling : but in Propria Persona I should be apt to quiz my
self. There is no objection of this kind to Lamia. . . .
He adds that there is a good deal of the same fault in The Eve of
St. Agnes, but it is not so glaring, because it had been carefully
revised.36 Both Woodhouse and Taylor were opposed to some
of these changes. For instance, the poet at one time changed the
romantic close of his poem,37
The Beadsman, after thousand aves told,
For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold,

into the slightly cynical

The beadsman stif?en'd, 'twixt a sigh and laugh
Ta'en sudden from his beads by one weak little cough.
Keats later, however, restored the original lines.38 Woodhouse was
particularly scandalized by the change that was to represent clearly
Madeline and Porphyro as enjoying the full fruition of their
love :39
... as it is now altered, as soon as M. has declared her love,
P. winds by degrees his arm round her, presses breast to
"Lowell, II, p. 320.
"Ibid., II, 337.
MCf. particularly Stanza XXIV, and lines 3-4, of Stanza XXVI, Keats,
pp. 221-22.
'"Oxford Keats, p. 229.
"Ibid.
? Letter of Woodhouse, September 20, 1819, Lowell II, p. 318.

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 462 The Sewanee Review

breast, and acts all the acts of a bonafide husband, while she
fancies she is only playing the part of a wife in a dream.
This alteration is of about 3 stanzas.
When Woodhouse expresses his apprehension that the poem will
not be fit for ladies to read, Keats retorts that he did not want
ladies to read his poetry: he wrote for men. The three stanzas
referred to by Woodhouse seem to be lost, the only hint of them
being the very mild lines which were cancelled,
See while she speaks his arms encroaching slow
Have zon'd her, heart to heart?loud, loud the dark winds blow.

Of his odes, which all the critics esteem as some of Keats's best
poetry, he has very little to say.40 The Ode to Psyche he says he
wrote leisurely, and he believes that it reads the more richly for
that reason.41
In his Preface to Endymion, he had stated that he intended to
return to Greek mythology in a later poem, which was to be
Hyperion. He wrote to Hay don :42
... In Endymion I think you may have many bits of the
deep and sentimental cast the nature of "Hyperion" will lead
me to treat it in a more naked and grecian Manner?and the
march of passion and endeavour will be undeviating. . . .
He finally abandons the poem, however,43
I have given up Hyperion?there are too many Miltonic in
versions in it?Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an
artful or rather, artist's humour. I wish to give myself up
to other sensations. English ought to be kept up.
At about this time he wrote to his brother in America that he con
sidered Paradise Lost, though fine in itself, a corruption of our
language, and that he thought Chatterton's English the purest of
all English. "Chatterton's language is entirely northern. I prefer
the native music of it to Milton's cut by feet. I have but lately
stood on my guard against Milton. Life to him would be death
^Cf. Ruskin, John, 1860, Modern Painters, Part VI, Ch. IX; Swinburne,
A. C, 1882-86, Keats, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Misc., p. 211 ; Rossetti, Wil
liam M., 1887, Life of John Keats (Great Writers), p. 194; Bryant, William
Cullen, 1870, A New Library of Poetry and Song, Introd., I, p 43. Cf.
also H. W. Mabie, Sir Sidney Colvin, and Miss Amy Lowell on Keats's
Odes.
"Letter XCII, to George and Georgiana Keats, p. 259, April 30, 1819.
^Letter, to Benjamin R. Haydon, January 23, 1818.
"Letter CXVII, p. 321, to J. H. Reynolds, September 22, 1819.

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 John Keats as a Critic 463

to me. Miltonic verse cannot be written, but is the verse of art.

I wish to devote myself to another verse alone."44
Was the "other verse" the unparalleled verse of the Odes ? Was
it a conscious return to Shakespeare ?45 He believed that his great
poetic expression was to be in the form of the drama. His Otha
the Great and the few scenes of King Stephen are, however, in
teresting only because in plot, characterization, and expression they
are imitations of Shakespeare. In Otho the Great, Brown and
Keats collaborated. Brown was to furnish the poet with the title,
characters, and dramatic conduct of the tragedy, and Keats was
to express it in poetry. After the completion of this play, Brown
suggested the subject of King Stephen, but Keats determined that
he would write this play entirely alone.
It is possible that Keats's dislike for his poem Isabella was, in
part, due to the fact that he apparently considered it less dramatic
than The Eve of St. Agnes or Lamia. At least, this is the order
he refers to these poems in his significant letter to Woodhouse.46
At times he is confident of the success of his drama, Otho the
Great, for one of his ambitions was "to make as great a revolu
tion in modern dramatic writing as Kean had done in acting."47
It would seem that it was finally accepted at Drury Lane Theatre
with the promise of its coming out in the season of 1820, but it
was never produced. Keats, however, does not willingly give up
the idea of writing great drama ; he will write poems throughout
which he will diffuse the coloring of The Eve of St. Agnes, with
emphasis on character and sentiment. A few such poems would
"nerve" him up, he believes, to the writing of a few fine plays,
his greatest ambition.48
In his letters, Keats makes very little reference to his other
poems. To George, he encloses a copy of The Eve of St. Mark,
with a few comments :49
Some time since I began a poem called "The Eve of St.
Mark," quite in the spirit of town quietude. I think it will
give you the sensation of walking about an old country town
"Letter CXVI, pp. 313-14, to George and Georgiana Keats, September
22, 1819.
"Cf. Murry, p. 188, and p. 195.
"Lowell, II, p. 337.
"Letter CX, p. 280.
"Letter CXXV, p. 33.
"Letter-, p. 302f.

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464 The Seivanee Review

in a coolish evening. I know not whether I shall ever finish

it ! I will give it as far as I have gone. Ut tibi placeat?
[Here he quotes the poem]
I hope you will like this for all its carelessness. . . .
With reference to the eighth stanza of the exquisite imitation
ballad, La Belle Dame sans Merci,
She took me to her elfin grot
And there she kept and sigh'd full sore,
And there I shut her wild, wild eyes
With kisses four . . .,
Keats writes :50
Why four kisses?you will say?why four, because I wish to
restrain the headlong impetuosity of my Muse?she would
have fain said 'score' without hurting the rhyme?but we must
temper the Imagination, as the Critics say, with Judgment.
I was obliged to choose an even number, that both eyes might
have fair play, and to speak truly I think two a piece quite
sufficient. Suppose I had said seven there would have been
three and a half a piece?a very awkward affair, and well
got out of on my side. . . .
One of the poems that he wrote to "nerve him up" to writ
ing drama was Cap and Bells. Of this poem, Keats wrote:51
I have come to a determination not to publish anything I
have now ready written : but for all that, to publish a poem
before long, and that I hope to make a fine one. 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.
Most of the critics think that such a poem as Cap and Bells was
foreign to Keats's genius and unworthy of his endeavor, but Miss
Lowell considers it as an experiment of Keats's in the field of
satire.52
V
In summary, we can now make a few conclusions. No
of course, in so short an essay as this has been made t
sources of Keats's poetry, but I have tried to show his
critical judgments : sometimes he is the judicial critic,
stance, when he makes a comparison of Wordsworth a

?Letter XCII, p. 251.

^Letter CXXV, p. 33, to John Taylor, November 17, 1819.
"Lowell, II, pp. 367-69.

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 Book Reviews 465

in his famous "mansion" passage; more often he is the apprecia

tive critic, as when he, with reverence, criticizes Shakespeare?
but he is always interpretive, if for no one else, then for himself.
With reference to his contemporaries, he was always clear
visioned: while his theory of poetry was not that of the "Words
worthian, or egotistical Sublime," he, nevertheless, saw the best
that was in Wordsworth;53 to him, Coleridge lacked "negative
capability" ; Byron, as a poet, was a "self-worshipper" ;54 Shelley
composed too rapidly,55 without duly considering the purely artistic
aim ; and Hazlitt56 was the only good "damner" [critic] of the age.
Romantic idealist that he was, he often outgrew and pushed aside,
for his own development and expansion, his former idols, such,
for instance, as Leigh Hunt.57
I have also tried to show briefly that in his appreciation of the
great poets, he built up a theory of poetry for himself. The funda
mental poetic principles for him were the possession on the part
of the poet of "negative capability," spontaneity of expression,
and the expression of imaginative, sensuous beauty, not with
Wordsworth's aim of upholding moral law, or Byron's advocacy
of his own egotistical longings, or Shelley's voicing of impossible
social reforms, but the expression of beauty, beauty alone, for its
own sake. I have quoted at length, at times, from Keats's critical
comments on his own poetry, which clearly indicate his apprecia
tion not only of his poetic ability, but of his limitations as well.
Few critics, even the most antagonistic, have given harsher ex
pressions of Keats's shortcomings than he himself gave in his
letters. Yet, it is undeniable that a sense of artistic restraint can
be seen developing in Keats from Endymion to the Odes, and this
is naturally reflected in his opinions of his poetry. In short, to
repeat what I said in the beginning, Keats is one of the few poets
in whom the poetical and critical faculties were united almost
equally.
Irving H. White.
Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"Letters XVXIV, p. 68; LII, pp. 107-09; and LXXX, pp. 248-49; Keats
review of Reynold's Peter Bell.
^Oxford Keats, The Fall of Hyperion, lines 217-18, p. 448. Do not these
lines refer to Byron?
"Letter CLV, p. 366.
^Letter XLIII, p. 87, to B. R. Haydon, March 21, 1818.
"Letter LXXX, p. 193, to George and Georgiana Keats, December 18,
1818.
-30

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