Life of John Keats

Book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1887. Excerpt: ... WE have seen what John Keats did in the shifting scene of the world, and in the high arena of poesy; we have seen what were the qualities of character and of mind which enabled him to bear his part in each. His work as a poet is to us the thing of primary importance: and it remains for us to consider what this poetic work amounts to in essence and in detail. The critic who is a critic--and not a Quarterly or a Blackwood reviewer or lampooner--is well aware of the disproportion between his*power of estimation, and the demand which such a genius as that of Keats, and such work as the maturest which he produced, make upon the estimating faculty. But this consideration cannot be allowed to operate beyond a certain point: the estimate has to be given--and given candidly and distinctly, however imperfectly. I shall therefore proceed to express my real opinion of Keats's poems, whether an admiring opinion -or otherwise; and shall write without reiterating--what I may nevertheless feel--a sense of the presumption involved in such a process. I shall in the main, as in previous chapters, follow the chronological order of the poems. As we have seen, Keats began versifying chiefly under a Spenserean influence; and it has been suggested that this influence remained puissant for harm as well as for good up to the close of his poetic career. I do not see much force in the suggestion: unless in this limited sense --that Spenser, like other Elizabethan and Jacobean, poets his successors, allowed himself very considerable latitude in saying whatever came into his head, relevant or irrelevant, appropriate or jarring, obvious or farfetched, simple or grandiose, according to the mood of the moment and the swing of composition, and thus the whole strain presents an aspect more of rich and arbitrary pictu...