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
In some of these cases the trouble is, not that the rime drags in a
train of far-fetched or intrusive ideas, but only that words are used
for the rime's sake in inexact and inappropriate senses. Such laxity in
the employment of words is one of the great weaknesses of Keats's style
in _Endymion_, and is no doubt partly connected with his general
disposition to treat language as though it were as free and fluid in his
own day as it had been two hundred years earlier. The same disposition
makes him reckless in turning verbs into nouns (a 'complain,' an
'exclaim,' a 'shine,' a 'pierce,' a 'quell') and nouns into verbs (to
'throe,' to 'passion,' to 'monitor,' to 'fragment up'); in using at his
convenience active verbs as passive and passive verbs as active; and in
not only reviving archaic participial forms ('dight,' 'fight,' 'raft,'
etc.) but in giving currency to participles of the class Coleridge
denounced as demoralizing to the ear, and as hybrids equivocally
generated of noun-substantives ('emblem'd,' 'gordian'd,' 'mountain'd,'
'phantasy'd'), as well as to adjectives borrowed from Elizabethan use or
new-minted more or less in accordance with it ('pipy,' 'paly,' 'ripply,'
'sluicy,' 'slumbery,' 'towery,' 'bowery,' 'orby,' 'nervy,' 'surgy,'
'sparry,' 'spangly).' It was these and such like technical liberties
with language which scandalized conservative critics, and caused even De
Quincey, becoming tardily acquainted with Keats's work, to dislike and
utterly under-rate it. He himself came before long to condemn the style
of 'the slipshod Endymion.' Nevertheless the consequence of his
experiments in reviving or imitating the usages of the great Renaissance
age of English poetry is only in part to be regretted. His rashness led
him into almost as many felicities as faults, and the examples of the
happier liberties in _Endymion_ has done much towards enriching the
vocabulary and diction of English poetry in the nineteenth century.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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