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INTRODUCTION

HEN Shelley, in a metaphor of exquisite appropriateness,
laments the dead Adonais as

The bloom whose petals, nipt before they blew,
Died on the promise of the fruit,

he suggests two thoughts which are never long dissociated in the
minds of those who love the poetry of Keats, the supreme beauty
of what his genius actually achieved and the pathos of his "un-
fulfilled renown". No poet at the
No poet at the age of twenty-four has pro-
duced work comparable in maturity of thought, in richness of
imagery, in easy mastery of execution, with the contents of the
1820 volume; and empty but irresistible conjecture can only
wonder to what heights of song he might have attained if, with
no advance of artistic power, but merely with that wider ex-
perience and greater independence which are the gift of time
rather than of genius, he had reached the years at which Shake-
speare had written Hamlet or Milton Paradise Lost. And yet in
Keats there was no taint of youthful precocity. He did not lisp
in numbers. He wrote nothing in his teens which could be com-
pared with the earliest works of Pope, or Chatterton, or Blake.
He had indeed but three years of serious literary apprenticeship,
years beset by difficulties as great as ever hampered the path of
poet; but not his vulgar origin and his banal surroundings, nor
the hostility of responsible criticism, nor the thraldom of unsatis-
fying love, nor the haunting presence of hereditary disease could
check the ripening of his poetic powers until, a year before his
actual death, mortality had set her cold finger upon him, and
except for one sonnet, a cry for release, his poetic life had reached
its tragic close.

There is no need to tell anew the beautiful story already familiar in the Life and Letters and in the biography written with fuller knowledge and riper literary judgment by Mr. Colvin ; it is rather my object to attempt some further contribution to the study of Keats's poetic development and to direct attention to the principal forces which moulded his mind and art. In the case of Keats this study is of special interest, and, I think, of special importance. "The fair paradise of Nature's light” is, doubtless, the inspiration of all great poetry, but the mind which nature inspires may acquire its individuality by widely different processes. Whilst each of his great contemporaries owed no little debt to the influence of a culture either inherited or acquired naturally from early surroundings, and to a wide and generous training which stimulated the mind from many sources, Keats was educated almost exclusively by the English poets. His studies, and he was a deep and earnest student, were concentrated upon their works, and the friendships which encouraged his genius were sealed in a common enthusiasm for them. The ideas which influenced his mind most vitally, the themes which most keenly affected his imagination, the language with which he widened the limited vocabulary of his ordinary life came to him from the same channel. To his English predecessors he served a willing apprenticeship, detecting the deficiencies of each through his appreciation of the peculiar excellences of the rest, till he gained at last that complete unfettered independence which had always been the goal of his ambition.

John Keats was born a member of that section of the community in which, perhaps, we are least accustomed to suspect the presence of poetic thought and feeling. His father, a native of the west country, went to London as a youth and became ostler to Mr. Jennings, a livery-stableman who carried on a prosperous business at the Swan and Hoop, Finsbury Pavement, married his master's daughter, and in course of time succeeded to the management of the business. Here it was that, on the 29th or 31st of October, 1795, the poet was born. He was the eldest of a family of five, with three brothers, one of whom died in infancy, and a sister. His parents are represented as possessed of a talent and distinction

unusual in their class; and ambitious for the future, they intended at one time to send their boys to Harrow; finding, however, the expense beyond their means, they decided upon a private school kept at Enfield by the Rev. John Clarke. Here John was sent in his eighth year, and was soon joined by his brother George. The choice was in many respects fortunate. Charles Cowden Clarke, who helped his father in the school and in all probability taught young Keats from the very first, took a keen interest in his pupil, and from being his master soon became his warmest friend, and exercised the greatest influence upon his development. He was a sound scholar and an accomplished musician; above all, he was an enthusiastic student of English poetry. To him we owe most of our knowledge of Keats's school-days. "In the early part of his school life," says Clarke, “John gave no extraordinary indications of intellectual character; it was in the last eighteen months or so that he became an omnivorous reader. History, voyages and travels formed the bulk of the school library and these he soon exhausted, but the books that he read with most assiduity were Tooke's Pantheon, Lemprière's Classical Dictionary, which he seemed to learn, and Spence's Polymetis." But before he reached the age of fifteen, he was removed from school, and apprenticed to a surgeon in practice at Edmonton. Hence his education, in the strictest sense of the word, must have been very scanty. Of Greek he had learned nothing; and though he had some knowledge of Latin, for he had already begun, as a pastime, a translation of Vergil's Aeneid, he could hardly have reached that stage of scholarship in which the influence of classical literature begins to make itself felt. But if he had not laid the foundation of a sound literary education he had at least acquired the habit of reading. After he had left school he continued to pay frequent visits to Enfield and “he rarely came empty-handed: either he had a book to read, or brought one to be exchanged " It was on one of these occasions, probably in 1812 or 1813, that Clarke read to him the Epithalamium of Spenser, and the artistic side of his nature received its

1 Recollections of Writers, by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, 1878.

first definite stimulus. "As he listened," we are told "his features and exclamations were ecstatic." It was in truth the revelation of a new world, but one which was his natural home though he had been born an exile from it. And now for the first time he became conscious of his inheritance. "That night," says Clarke, "he took away with him a volume of the Faerie Queene, and he went through it as a young horse through a spring meadow ramping! Like a true poet, too, he especially singled out epithets, for that felicity and power in which Spenser is so eminent. He hoisted himself up, and looked burly and dominant, as he said, 'What an image that is-"sea-shouldering whales!""" "It was the Faerie Queene," says Brown, a friend of Keats's later years, "that first awakened his genius. In Spenser's fairy land he was enchanted, breathed in a new world and became a new being; till enamoured of the stanza, he attempted to imitate it and succeeded."

It is significant that Keats's earliest known composition is the Imitation of Spenser, written probably in 1813, and Spenser never lost hold upon his imagination. There was indeed an essential kinship between the two poets, and that brooding love of sensuous beauty, that frank response to the charm of nature and romance, that luxuriance of fancy and felicity of expression to which the Faerie Queene owes its irresistible fascination were soon to be re-echoed in the poems of Keats. But Keats was not the first poet to acknowledge that Spenser was his original. Apart from those who may justly claim so honourable a lineage, in every succeeding epoch there are to be found poetasters who have attempted to catch, though from afar, faint echoes of his melody, and to inform their own lifeless puppets with something of the spirit and the gesture of his magic world. Keats's literary education did not enable him to distinguish the essential qualities of Spenser from those of his latest imitators. Naturally, therefore, the influence of the eighteenth-century allegorists is paramount in his earliest writings. They were far easier to reproduce, and he could hardly be expected to realise when allegory devoid of imagination had become mere idle personification, and when a rich exuberance

and easy grace of language had given way, in writers of a less intense and less continuous inspiration, to mere licentious fluency or empty verbiage. In this he was, doubtless, affected by the poetic taste of his time, which, as yet unconverted to the revolutionary doctrines of Wordsworth and Coleridge, still clung to the milder and more conventional romanticism countenanced

by the age of reason. Of this period in his development he

wrote later "Beattie and Mrs. Tighe once delighted me," and at the same time he showed himself to be momentarily affected by the Juvenilia of Byron and the drawing-room melodies of Moore. A weak sonnet shows that already he had come under the spell of Chatterton, but it was not till later that Chatterton influenced his literary methods. For the present he was an eighteenth-century Spenserian, and traces of the diction and style of the eighteenth-century poets still linger even in that poem in which he most fiercely denounces them.

But this phase of his development, which has little relation with his later work, was soon followed by one of more lasting significance. Early in 1815 he came under the spell of Chapman's translation of Homer, of the early work of Milton, and of the poems of Fletcher and of William Browne, whilst his delight in the seventeenth-century Spenserians became inextricably blended with his admiration for the most prominent of Spenser's living disciples, the charming and versatile Leigh Hunt.

It was in the summer of 1816 that Keats paid his first visit to the Hampstead cottage, where Hunt presided over a lively circle of literary and artistic spirits, many of whom were soon to be numbered among Keats's own friends; but it is certain that some time before this Hunt had indirectly exercised no small influence on his mind. The Clarkes were enthusiastic admirers of Hunt, and in their home Keats had been a regular reader of Hunt's weekly paper, The Examiner, from which he had imbibed much of Hunt's radicalism and love of civil and religious liberty. Moreover, it must be borne in mind that to the eyes of young Clarke Hunt fulfilled the double rôle of poetpatriot, so that in every way he would prepare his pupil for the greater master. And when in February, 1815, Hunt was released