Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-FameColvin, Sidney
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Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame
Colvin, Sidney
Keats, John, 1795-1821; Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography
Sonnets are not often addressed by publishers to their clients: but one
has been found in the handwriting of Charles Ollier, and almost
certainly composed by him, expressing admiration for Keats's work. The
brothers Ollier, it will be remembered, were Shelley's publishers, and
for a while also Leigh Hunt's and Lamb's, and Charles was the
poetry-loving and enthusiastic brother of the two, and himself a writer
of some accomplishment in prose and verse. But in point of fact, outside
the immediate Leigh Hunt circle, the volume made extremely little
impression, and the public was as far as possible from being roused from
its occupations or made tremble. 'Alas!' continues Cowden Clarke, 'the
book might have emerged in Timbuctoo with far stronger chance of fame
and appreciation. The whole community as if by compact, seemed
determined to know nothing about it.'
Clarke here somewhat exaggerates the facts. Leigh Hunt kept his own
review of the volume back for some three months, very likely with the
just idea that praise from him might prejudice Keats rather than serve
him. At length it appeared, in three numbers of the _Examiner_ for June
and July, the first number setting forth the aims and tendencies of the
new movement in poetry with a conscious clearness such as to those
taking part in a collective, three-parts instinctive effort of the kind
comes usually in retrospect only and not in the thick of the struggle.
In the second and third notices Hunt speaks of the old graces of poetry
reappearing, warns 'this young writer of genius' against
disproportionate detail and a too revolutionary handling of metre, and
after quotation winds up by calling the volume 'a little luxuriant heap
of
Such sights as youthful poets dream
On summer eves by haunted stream.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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