So much for the man; now for the poetry. The first thing to be got clear is that it is _young_ poetry; it was all written before the age of twenty-four. An ignorant boy, brought up in uncultured surroundings, gropes his way out into the beauty and splendor of art. He is enraptured, quivering with delight; nature to him is a perpetual ecstasy, and words are jewels out of which he makes ravishment for the senses. He has a marvelous gift of language, splendor like a flood of moonlight flung out upon a mountain lake. He is in love, first with nature, then with a young lady of eighteen, whom he describes by the adjectives “stylish” and “ignorant”; nevertheless, he falls under her spell, and after he is dead the young lady says that the kindest thing people can do for him is to forget him. So little does a great poet’s dream of feminine loveliness understand his true character and greatness! We may be sure that if Keats had lived to marry Fanny Brawne he would not have been happy, and would have realized only too quickly that love is not merely a thrill of young sensibility, a rapturous “Dream of St. Agnes,” but a grave problem requiring for its solution both reason and conscience. The early poetry of Keats represents that stage of simple, instinctive, unreflecting delight which we call by the name “Greek.” He chose Greek themes and Greek imagery, and was never more Greek than when he tried to be medieval. But the most significant thing about his work is the quick maturing of it, even in those scant four years. A shadow of pain darkens his being, the pangs of frustrated love wring cries of anguish from him; and so we come to the second stage of the Greek spirit--the sense of fate, of cruelty hidden at the heart of life, the terror and despair of loveliness that knows it is doomed. Out of this mood came his greatest poems, the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the “Ode to a Nightingale,” the “Ode to Melancholy.” If anyone denies that this poet is trying to teach us something about life, if anyone thinks there is no message in this infinite mournfulness, he has indeed a feeble apprehension. But let us, for the sake of argument, assume with the art for art’s sakers that Keats was an esthete, and produced “pure beauty,” unalloyed by any preaching. Would that mean that we had found some art which is not propaganda? Assuredly not; and those who besiege us with contentious examples--Keats, Gautier, Whistler, Hearn, etc.--simply show that they have not understood what we mean by the thesis that all art is propaganda. It is that, fundamentally, as an inescapable psychological fact; and it does not cease to be that just because the artist preaches enjoyment instead of effort.