Aspects of Literature — Key Ideas to Explore

s were taken not by the intellect, but by the being.

He dropped 'Hyperion' because it was inadequate to the whole of him. He was weary of its deliberate art because it interposed a veil between him and that which he needed to express; it was an imposition upon himself.

'I have given up "Hyperion"--there were too many Miltonic inversions 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. It may be interesting to you to pick out some lines from "Hyperion" and a mark + to the false beauty proceeding from art and one || to the true voice of feeling....'--(Letter to J.H. Reynolds, Sept. 22, 1819.)

That outwardly negative reaction is packed with positive implications. 'English ought to be kept up' meant, on Keats's lips, a very great deal. But there is other and more definite authority for the positive direction in which he was turning. To his brother George he wrote, at the same time:--

'I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to him would be death to me. Miltonic verse cannot be written, but is the verse of art. I wish to devote myself to another verse alone.'

More definite still is the letter of November 17, 1819, to his friend and publisher, John Taylor:--

'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. I and myself cannot agree about this at all. Wonders are no wonders to me. I am more at home amongst Men and Women. I would rather read Chaucer than Ariosto. The little dramatic skill I may as yet have, however badly it might show in a Drama, would, I think, be sufficient for a Poem. I wish to diffuse the colouring of St Agnes Eve throughout a poem in which Character and Sentiment would be the figures to such drapery. Two or three such poems if God should spare me, written in the course of the next six years would be a famous gradus ad Parnassum altissimum. I mean they would nerve me up to the writing of a few fine plays--my greatest ambition--when I do feel ambitious....'

No letter could be saner, nor more indicative of calm resolve. Yet the precise determination is that nothing that went to make the 1820 volume should be published, neither Odes, nor Tales, nor 'Hyperion.' This is that mood of Keats which Sir Sidney Colvin, in his comment upon a passage in the revised Induction, calls one of 'fierce injustice to his own achievements and their value.' But a poet, if he is a real one, judges his own achievements not by those of his contemporaries, but by the standard of his own intention.

The evidence that Keats's mind had passed beyond the stage at which it could be satisfied by the poems of the 1820 volume is overwhelming. His letters to George of April, 1819, show that he was naturally evolving towards an attitude, a philosophy, more profound and comprehensive than could be expressed adequately in such records of momentary aspiration and emotion as the Odes; though the keen and sudden poignancy that had invaded them belongs to the new Keats. They mark the transition to the new poetry which he vaguely discerned. The problem was to find the method. The letters we have quoted to show his reaction from the Miltonic influence display the more narrowly 'artistic' aspect of the same evolution. A technique more responsive to the felt reality of experience must be found--'English ought to be kept up'--the apparatus of Romantic story must be abandoned--'Wonders are no wonders to me'--yet the Romantic colour must be kept to restore to a realistic psychology the vividness and richly various quality that are too often lost by analysis We do not believe that we have in any respect forced the interpretation of the letters; the terminology of that age needs to be translated to be understood 'Men and Women ... Characters and Sentiments' are called, for better or worse, 'psychology' nowadays. And our translation has this merit, that some of our ultra-moderns will listen to the word 'psychology,' where they would be bat-blind to 'Characters' and stone-deaf to 'Sentiments.'