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PARTISAN REVIEW
distastes, his conception of his own work. References to poets other than
Shakespeare are not very frequent in Keats's letters. He admired
Wordsworth while thinking that he was a freak genius, "an egotistical
sublime" whose didacticism had to be accepted in him but not as an
example to
be
imitated; while he is not malicious about either, it is clear
that he did not think much of the Byron and the Shelley he had read,
and equally clear that there was nobody among his contemporaries
whose judgment on his own poetry he really trusted or respected.
Keats is as indisputable an example as any of which we have record
of a man with a vocation, whose life was consciously dedicated to
poetry:
The only thing that can ever affect me personally for more than one
short passing day, is any doubt about my powers for poetry-I seldom
have any, and I look with hope to the nighing time when I shall have
none.
He can even put his work before writing to Fanny Brawne:
I would feign, as my sails are set, sail on without an interruption for a
Brace of Months longer-I am in complete cue-in the fever; and shall
in these four Months do an immense deal-This Page as my eye skims
over it I see is excessively unloverlike and ungallant-I cannot help it–
I am no officer in yawning quarters; no Parson-romeo ... My heart seems
now made of iron-I could not write a proper answer to an invitation
to Idalia.
Dedicated artists are liable to suffer from two complaints, a
humorless over-earnest attitude toward art, and a lack of ordinary social
responsibility, a feeling that what they are doing is so important that
it is the duty of others to support them. Reading Rilke's letters or the
Journal of Henry James, for example, there are times when their tone
of hushed reverence before the artistic mystery becomes insufferable and
one would like to give them both a good shaking; similarly, the incessant
harping on money in the correspondence of Baudelaire or Wagner
provokes in the most sympathetic admirer the reaction of a sound
bourgeois-"Why doesn't he go and look for a job?"
From both of these defects Keats is completely and refreshingly free.
As convinced as any writer of the seriousness and value of art, he never
sounds like an abbe of the aesthetic, and, though frequently in financial
difficulties, he is never extravagant with money he has been given and
never forgets the reality of the situation. Thus he writes to Brown:
I am getting into an idle-minded, vicious way of life, almost content to
live upon others ... I have not known yet what it is to be diligent. I
purpose living in town in a cheap lodging, and endeavouring, for a
