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 regard to Keats's social qualities, he is said, and owns himself, to
have been not always quite well conditioned or at his ease in the
presence of women, but in that of men all accounts agree that he was
pleasantness itself: quiet and abstracted or brilliant and voluble by
turns, according to his mood and company, but thoroughly amiable and
unaffected. His voice was rich and low, and when he joined in
discussion, it was usually with an eager but gentle animation, while his
occasional bursts of fierce indignation at wrong or meanness bore no
undue air of assumption, and failed not to command respect. 'In my
knowledge of my fellow beings,' says Cowden Clarke, 'I never knew one
who so thoroughly combined the sweetness with the power of gentleness,
and the irresistible sway of anger, as Keats. His indignation would have
made the boldest grave; and they who had seen him under the influence of
injustice and meanness of soul would not forget the expression of his
features--"the form of his visage was changed."'
In lighter moods his powers of mimicry and dramatic recital are
described as great and never used unkindly. He loved the exhibition of
any kind of energy, and was as almost as keen a spectator of the rough
and violent as of the tender and joyous aspects and doings of life and
nature. 'Though a quarrel in the streets,' he says, 'is a thing to be
hated the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest man shows a
grace in his quarrel.' His yearning love for the old polytheism and
instinctive affinity with the Greek spirit did not at all blunt his
relish of actualities. To complete our picture and illustrate the wide
and unfastidious range of his contact with life and interest in things,
let us take Cowden Clarke's account of the way he could enjoy and
re-enact such a scene of brutal sport and human low-life as our
refinement no longer tolerates:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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