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Snow fell heavily in the windows of confectioners' shops, and Father Christmas smiled in Keats's Bazaar the fawning smile of a myth who knows himself to be exploded; but beyond these and similar efforts to remedy the forgetfulness of a careless climate, there was no sign anywhere in the Five Towns, and especially in Bursley, of the immediate approach of the season of peace, goodwill, and gluttony on earth.
Unquestionably, as with Keats's word "forever," the word "jealous" was perfectly familiar. It was not any one exceptional word which was necessary, but a weaving of simple words if I may be permitted the expression. Here, in order to get the effect desired this master-mind refrained from using a vocabulary.
I believe that the whole of Hazlitt's lectures, on the British Poets, the Writers of the Time of Elizabeth, and the Comic Writers, were delivered in that Institution, during the years 1817 and 1818; shortly after which time the establishment appears to have been broken up. The lady's remark upon the character and expression of Keats's features is both happy and true.
The greatest love-poetry has not been written by men who have found easy happiness in love. Donne's poems are the poems of a frustrated lover. Keats's greatest poetry was the fruit of unfulfilled love. Thus genius turns poverty into riches. Few men of genius are enviable save in their genius. Beethoven, a frustrate lover and ultimately a deaf musician, is a type of genius at its most sublime.
Now, on my later visit, it was a cold, rainy day, and it was chill within the house and without, and I imputed my weather to the time of Keats's sojourn, and thought of him sitting by his table there in that bare, narrow, stony room and coughing at the dismal outlook.
The critical world, by which term I mean the censorious portion of it; for many have no other idea of criticism than, that of censure and objection, the critical world have so gloated over the feebler, or, if they will, the defective side of Keats's genius, and his friends, his gloryingly partial friends, have so amply justified him, that I feel inclined to add no more to the category of opinions than to say, that the only fault in his poetry I could discover was a redundancy of imagery, that exuberance, by-the-by, being a quality of the greatest promise, seeing that it is the constant accompaniment of a young and teeming genius.
Keats's verses, which made us think it very likely, he might become a real poet of England, provided he could be persuaded to give up all the tricks of Cockneyism, and forswear for ever the thin potations of Mr. Leigh Hunt. We, therefore, rated him as roundly as we decently could do, for the flagrant affectations of those early productions of his.
Do you recall any poems in which he writes of ordinary people or of ordinary experiences? Keats. What is the essence of Keats's poetical creed, as expressed in the "Ode on a Grecian Urn"? What are the remarkable elements in his life and work? What striking difference do you find between his early poems and those of Shelley and Byron? What are the chief subjects of his verse?
Though Shelley gave this advice, which was anything but unsound, he is said to have taken good-naturedly some steps with a view to getting the volume printed. Mr. Martin's Lane, when quite young, about the printing a little volume of Keats's first poems. This statement is not correct so far at least as the longer poems in the volume are concerned.
A hasty person may say "What! do you venture to quarrel with letters where, side by side with agreeable miscellaneous details, you may suddenly come upon the original and virgin text of 'La Belle Dame sans Merci'?" Most certainly not. Such a find, or one ten times less precious, would make one put up with accompaniments much more than ten times worse than the worst of Keats's letters.
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