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
I have shown by a specimen how Brown, working from his diaries of the
tour, expatiates on his and his companion's enthusiasm over the romantic
scenes they visited. Keats in his own letters says comparatively little
about the scenery, and that quite simply and quietly, not at all with
the descriptive enthusiasm of the picturesque tourist: hardly indeed
with so much of that quality as the sedate and fastidious Gray had shown
in his itineraries fifty years before. Partly, no doubt, a certain
instinctive reticence, a restraining touch of the Greek [Greek: aidios],
keeps him from fluent words on the beauties that most deeply moved him:
his way rather is to let them work silently in his being until at the
right moment, if the right moment comes, their essence and vital power
shall distil themselves for him into a phrase of poetry. Partly, also,
the truth is that an intensely active, intuitive genius for nature like
his hardly needs the stimulus of nature's beauties for long or at their
highest power, but on a minimum of experience can summon up and multiply
for itself spirit sunsets, and glories of dream lake and mountain,
richer and more varied than the mere receptive lover of scenery can
witness and register in memory during a lifetime of travel and pursuit.
In this respect Keats's letters written on his northern tour seem more
essentially the letters of a poet than Shelley's from Switzerland and
Italy. Shelley pours out long, set, detailed descriptions, written as
any cultivated and enthusiastic observer visiting such scenes for the
first time might write, only with more beauty and resource of language,
rather than as one made by imagination a born partner and co-creator
with nature herself, free by birthright of her glories and knowing them
all, as it were, beforehand. Keats's way of telling about his travels is
quite familiar and unstrained. Here is a paragraph from his first letter
to his brother Tom, written at Keswick after walking round Derwentwater
and climbing Skiddaw:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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