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PARTISAN REVIEW
of Renaissance man, and which in Keats's day, had become the will of
the British middle class.
The ideal reader of Keats's major poems is one who is between the
ages of fifteen and twenty-one, ages at which the rediscovery of the senses,
and the discovery of self become all important; to this particular reader
Keats has much to say; the music that is overheard within his lines and
the light that seems to shine between them, lose none of their heightened
sensibility by being related, as they are, to unamed sexual terms. The
proximity of death in Keats's odes and later lyrics is disassociated from
the presence of old age; in them the thought of death is properly melan–
choly, death as the young might feel it in the passage of time and
in
the enjoyment of the moment that cannot return-it is certainly not as
Shakespeare views it in
King Lear,
or as W.
B.
Yeats advances toward
it in his later poems. The older reader of Keats brings more experience
to a reading of Keats's lines than he is likely to get from them; to him
the pleasure is of less immediacy, and if he is sentimentally inclined, the
very sensuousness of Keats's music and visual imagery will restore the
memory of the unhappy and fortunate moments of lost youth: under
this spell he becomes tempted to forgive Keats's errors in taste and
diction, . and to forgive his own lapses in Keats's name is a form of
self-flattery too attractive to be lightly thrust aside.
The immediacy of Keats's charm to youthful emotions and his
creation of a Renaissance world, almost literally, within the province of
his verse, places his poetry at measurable distance from the kinds of
poetry that are being written today. His example is one that does not
permit literal imitation, but rather, one of devotion of the poet to his
art. His own letters, recently re-edited by M. Buxton Forman and the
letters of the Keats circle show how that devotion brought him friends
and an immortality, a moral which scarcely needs reiteration here. Of
the friends, it might well be added, that only one, John Hamilton Rey–
nolds, served him with evident and sensible advice by convincing him
he had better cancel an ill-written preface to "Endymion." Of the many
friends, though Keats had begged them to go with
him,
only one, the
shrewd, light-hearted, tactful, ungifted young painter, Joseph Severn,
accompanied the dying poet to Italy, and he thereby gained an im–
mortality of his own, which he enjoyed for more than half a century
when he died at the age of eighty-six in 1879.
Horace Gregory
