702
PARTISAN REVIEW
dancing rooms and other societies as I have seen you-I do not want
to
live," or "I should like to die. I am sickened at the brute world which
you are smiling with. I hate men and women more," strike the heart with
pity and fear; nobody but a priggish fool would censure the man who
wrote them for they themselves pass judgment on our "poor im–
passioned clay."
Any discussion of Keats's letters, therefore, should confine itself to
those written before February 3, 1820.
I wonder
if
school children are still taught, as I was, the ridiculous
myth that Keats was killed by a bad review. I wonder, furthermore,
how much Shelley, who is largely responsible for it, actually believed
what he wrote in
Adonais;
one cannot help suspecting that sub–
conscious jealousy of Keats's superior gifts and resentment at his lack
of admiration for Shelley's own poetry played a role in his portrait of
Keats as a lovable weakling, a sort of male and literary
Dame aux
Cameiias.
Had it been true, Byron's sneers in
Don Juan
would have
been fully deserved, but both the poems and the letters prove it to be a
fantastic distortion.
Adonais is a sensitive plant without an idea in his head; Keats's
mind, on the other hand, was a rare combination of witty and original
intelligence with common sense. There are lines in his poetry with which
one can find fault, there are statements in his letters which one may
wish to question, but I cannot remember anything in either which one
could call just silly. There are very few poets of any period-none of
Keats's contemporaries are among them-of whom this can be said.
Even the two sentences for which he has most frequently been attacked,
the conclusion of the
Ode on a Grecian Urn
and the
"0
for a life of
Sensations rather than Thoughts" in the letter to Bailey have only to
be read in their context to see that they do not mean what their hostile
critics say they mean.
A small but revealing example of Keats's maturity of outlook is his
political attitude. Politics is a subject upon which poets are peculiarly
liable to make asses of themselves. Keats moved in a circle with strong
liberal views and a young man of twenty-three might most excusably
have became hot-headed and exaggerated in his expressions; in fact, the
few political comments that he does make are extraordinarily cool and
sensible.
Nothwithstanding the part which the Liberals take in the Cause of
Napoleon I cannot but think he has done more harm to the life of
Liberty than anyone else could have done; not that the divine right
Gentlemen have done or intend to do any good-no they have taken a
