A History of English Literature

more poetry of the highest order than any other book of original verse, of
so small a size, ever sent from the press. By this time, however, Keats
himself was stricken with consumption, and in the effort to save his life a
warmer climate was the last resource. Lack of sympathy with Shelley and his
poetry led him to reject Shelley's generous offer of entertainment at Pisa,
and he sailed with his devoted friend the painter Joseph Severn to southern
Italy. A few months later, in 1821, he died at Rome, at the age of
twenty-five. His tombstone, in a neglected corner of the Protestant
cemetery just outside the city wall, bears among other words those which in
bitterness of spirit he himself had dictated: 'Here lies one whose name was
writ in water.' But, in fact, not only had he created more great poetry
than was ever achieved by any other man at so early an age, but probably no
other influence was to prove so great as his on the poets of the next
generation.
The most important qualities of his poetry stand out clearly:
1. He is, as we have implied, the great apostle of full though not
unhealthy enjoyment of external Beauty, the beauty of the senses. He once
said: 'I feel sure I should write, from the mere yearning and tenderness I
have for the beautiful, even if my night's labors should be burnt every
morning and no eye ever rest upon them.' His use of beauty in his poetry is
marked at first by passionate Romantic abandonment and always by lavish
Romantic richness. This passion was partly stimulated in him by other
poets, largely by the Italians, and especially by Spenser, from one of
whose minor poems Keats chose the motto for his first volume: 'What more
felicity can fall to creature than to enjoy delight with liberty?'
Shelley's enthusiasm for Beauty, as we have seen, is somewhat similar to
that of Keats. But for both Spenser and Shelley, in different fashions,
external Beauty is only the outer garment of the Platonic spiritual Beauty,
while to Keats in his poetry it is, in appearance at least, almost
everything. He once exclaimed, even, 'Oh for a life of sensations rather
than of thoughts!' Notable in his poetry is the absence of any moral
purpose and of any interest in present-day life and character, particularly
the absence of the democratic feeling which had figured so largely in most
of his Romantic predecessors. These facts must not be over-emphasized,
however. His famous final phrasing of the great poetic idea--'Beauty is
truth, truth beauty'--itself shows consciousness of realities below the
surface, and the inference which is sometimes hastily drawn that he was
personally a fiberless dreamer is as far as possible from the truth. In
fact he was always vigorous and normal, as well as sensitive; he was always
devoted to outdoor life; and his very attractive letters, from which his
nature can best be judged, are not only overflowing with unpretentious and
cordial human feeling but testify that he was not really unaware of
specific social and moral issues. Indeed, occasional passages in his poems
indicate that he intended to deal with these issues in other poems when he
should feel his powers adequately matured. Whether, had he lived, he would
have proved capable of handling them significantly is one of the questions
which must be left to conjecture, like the other question whether his power
of style would have further developed.
Almost all of Keats' poems are exquisite and luxuriant in their embodiment
of sensuous beauty, but 'The Eve of St. Agnes,' in Spenser's richly
lingering stanza, must be especially mentioned.
2. Keats is one of the supreme masters of poetic expression, expression the
most beautiful, apt, vivid, condensed, and imaginatively suggestive. His
poems are noble storehouses of such lines as these: