Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-FameColvin, Sidney
General
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 these early attempts Keats again ventures some way, but not yet far,
in the direction of breaking the fetters of the regular couplet. He runs
his sentences freely enough through a succession of lines, but nine
times out of ten with some kind of pause as well as emphasis on the
rime-word. He deals freely in double endings, and occasionally, but not
often (oftenest in the epistle to George) breaks the run of a line with
a full stop in or near the middle. He is in like manner timid and
sparing as yet in the use, to which a little later he was to give rein
so fully, of Elizabethan word-forms, or forms modelled for himself on
Elizabethan usage.
Somewhat more free and adventurous alike in metre and in diction are the
two poems, _Sleep and Poetry_ and '_I stood tip-toe_,' which Keats wrote
after he came back to London in the autumn. These are the things which,
together with two or three of the sonnets, give its real distinction and
high promise to the volume. Both in substance and intention they are
preludes merely, but preludes of genius, and, although marked by many
immaturities, as interesting and attractive perhaps as anything which
has ever been written by a poet of the same age about his art and his
aspirations. In them the ardent novice communes intently with himself on
his own hopes and ambitions. Possessed by the thrilling sense that
everything in earth and air is full, as it were, of poetry in solution,
he has as yet no clearness as to the forms and modes in which these
suspended elements will crystallize for him. In _Sleep and Poetry_ he
tries to get into shape his conceptions of the end and aim of poetical
endeavour, conjures up the difficulties of his task, counts over the new
achievement and growing promise of the time in which he lives, and gives
thanks for the encouragement by which he has been personally sustained.
In '_I stood tip-toe_' he runs over the stock of nature-images which are
his own private and peculiar delight, traces in various phases and
aspects of nature a symbolic affinity, or spiritual identity, with
various forms and kinds of poetry; tells how such a strain of verse will
call up such and such a range of nature images, and conversely how this
or that group of outdoor delights will inspire this or that mood of
poetic invention; and finally goes on to speculate on the moods which
first inspired some of the Grecian tales he loves best, and above all
the tale of Endymion and Cynthia, the beneficent wonders of whose bridal
night he hopes himself one day to retell.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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