PERSPECTIVES ON KEATS
315
structor,
if
not the student, to believe that something has been accom–
plished and that a full day's work is done. And young instructors who
have not willingly read a poem in their lives, who are philologists at
heart, and who can recite "A Glossary of the New Criticism,"* are able
to reduce the lines "To Autumn" into the jargon of current academic
English within half an hour.
So far, the actual nature of Keats's poetry remains untouched by
twentieth-century evaluations of its kind and quality; the nearest ap–
proach to viewing Keats's verse in a new light (and without loss to its
value as poetry) may be found in D. H. Lawrence's essay on "The
Nightingale" which was published in 1927, and beyond that essay, little
of pertinent or lasting commentary has been written. The approach to
Keats's poetry has been darkened by a sentimental reversal of the attacks
showered upon him by the Scotch reviewers, the details of which have
their latest echoes in the present two volumes of letters. But the time
has arrived to go beyond the usual paths of inquiry and interpretation–
it is not enough to grant that Keats's claims to being a poet are still
valid.
We should admit that the range of Keats's experience, as it is re–
flected in his poetry, is small, and in time, extremely brief, and that
the texture of his writing and what he had to say have their likeness in
Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis" and certain passages of "Romeo
and Juliet." It is clearly the poetry written by a gifted young man, a
nineteenth-century Londoner, when Hampstead was a heath and not
a park, who ambitiously and rightly chose British Renaissance models
of verse for composition. More than that, his eyes saw the world in
Renaissance perspective; his visual imagination selected and arranged
its figures and objects in Renaissance order. It is an appropriate accident
(since the illustration was chosen to show how closely Fanny Brawne
resembled "the girl in the white dress") that a detail of Titian's "Sacred
and Profane Love" is reproduced among the letters of the Keats circle.
The very "inscape," as Hopkins would call it, of Keats's poetry is of
Renaissance coloring, depth and richness. The individual will that
Keats possessed, which did not inspire his verse, yet freed him from
self-pity, raised him above the mediocrities who were his friends, as well
as above a dubious family of inn and stable keepers, is the "free will"
*
I refer the reader to "A Glossary of the New Criticism"
(Poetry,
Chicago,
January, 1949) which reveals a language (not English), but one that is both less
logical and less graceful when read aloud than Esperanto. The only excuse for
reading it at all is that it increases by accidental contrast an appreciation for
the lyrical passages and wit of James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake."
