John Keats! John Keats!-- Other poets have written Nightingales and Grecian Urns and Sonnets and Mirth-and-Passion things: but _he_ wrote them in his glorious and wistful pain. He wrote the sweet headaches of his spirit into his delicate beaten-gold verse: the precious fevers of his mental veins: the bone-aches and muscle-aches of his thoughts: the darling skin-damps and palm-damps of his divine fancy:--all in the Song of his lilied youth. There is no poet but writes his poetry out of inner travails and immense wistfulness. But they all write just beside their travail, not in it: just beside their wistfulness, not with it. A poet who feels the throat of his soul aching and swollen and inflamed writes--not just that astral diphtheria, not till another time: but instead the fine smothering of a hope, perhaps, the oblique suffocating of a love. A poet whose brain-hands throb with some horrible dulcet-ish tiredness from handling the heavy bright tools of his craft writes instead the throbbing of his brain-soles and brain-insteps from walking small odd hard rutted daily ways. It rouses me--it heats my eyeballs with salty honeyed warmth as I read: but it is not John Keats: who writes his own immediate magic sickness in perfect sudden obvious blood-warm golden _Now_! It is always old, old-fashioned ailment, worn of ages. The drowsy ache of the Nightingale goes a thousand years back and a thousand years to come: the restless ecstasy of a thousand thousand Nightingales, one for each who reads, in any age, all ages. Long, long after the jeweled English language is gone, dead as Homer’s, Keats’s Nightingale will flutter lyric-winged in the nervous jeweled lovely _Now_. ‘Weep for Adonis,’ wailed the differently-lovely Shelley, ‘he is dead.’ But he isn’t dead. He is terribly living, passionately living. Each day of my life I feel him living. He breathes. He breathes close to me, pantingly, like a swimmer breasting waves or a playing child in a summer day.--John Keats! Just Beneath My Skin he is my God-of-the-World, my Fetich and my Lover. He has been my Lover for seven gold years. He is the first beauty in my flawed futile life. He is the most beautiful thing in the living and dying world. John Keats--John Keats!-- In everyone else I can feel mixed motives, tough tangled silk threads of self woven into wonderful wefts of days and deeds: in _everybody_, from Iscariot to Toussaint L’Ouverture, from Jeanne d’Arc to Victoria Woodhull, from Paul of Tarsus to Aaron Burr. Only John Keats stands out alone, a true-breathing Poet, an Inmost Heart bleeding outward.