The lyric poet is the true poet. The lyric poet achieves no end in his art. He turns fragments of light and life into terms of beauty and sends them flying forth on flaming word-wings which translate the smooth human flesh they brush-by into delicious flesh-of-gold, flesh-of-petals, flesh-of-fire! But he makes no morals, teaches no lessons, finishes nothing. It’s as it should be. Nothing _is_ finished. The mixed world is all unfinished, a glorified Mistake. The race is a millionfold Mistake: lives it, breathes it, battens on it--coarsely and finely and lamentably and musically and bravely. So that all poetry which wanders from the lyric is only a play or a picture or an airship or a cause which aims at _fait-accompli_, attaining an object: it is limited and man-made: its beauty is lopped off like boughs and branches after a storm: its wings are clipped. Its distanceless spaces, little and large, are visibly engineered by mathematic hands. But the lyric poetry is the true luminous and bloody interpreting of humanness. John Keats wrote by the lights of his living and he lived all his days in joyous lyric anguish. Once he wrote, ‘Ever let the Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home.’ It is a factful of himself--lawless, radical and non-civilized, agleam in the mixed world. It is everybody--poets, burglars, nursemaids: everybody. He wrote it in a hundred other ways, but it is all in that: it is the lyric epitome of every day. Pleasure never _is_ at home. And ‘Heard melodies are sweet,’ he wrote, ‘but those unheard are sweeter’-- There spoke the wild delicate wiseness of his brain and the passionate delicate wonder of his heart.--John Keats! John Keats! But everything he wrote, the Grecian Urn itself, is immeasurably less lyric than himself writing it and being it. He is rich bright-wet living lyric for this Me in this Now though he has lain dead in Rome nearly the full hundred years. My garbled life and my thinking hunger feed upon him. He was the one human one who walked on in the way before him: not around the jagged little stones and icy little pools that were in it: but straight on through them all, though his lyric feet were quivering shuddering sensitive, sensitive beyond knowledge of commoner feet that walk around. It fattens my leanest self to keep that in my constant remembrance. The thought of his brave radiant loveliness reassures me to myself, by the hour. I am futile: but _he_ is mysteriously omnipotently useful and I catch some of it from him. I am half-full of vanity: but he is of a lustrous priceless vanity himself that justifies mine and all the world’s. I am fearing and false: but he is so brave, so true to infinite form, that by it he leavens the lump of the whole world’s mendacious cowardice.