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Updated: April 30, 2025
At the old-fashioned school she had attended, few poets were considered fit for the girls' reading; Tennyson, of course, was included in the pupils' studies, and Shakespeare, carefully edited, was a standby; but of the works of Browning, Rossetti, Swinburne, Keats, Toni was lamentably ignorant.
His face was set towards the past, not towards the future. He never caught the restlessness of this century, nor the prophetic light that shone in the faces of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats; if he apprehended the stir of the new spirit he still, by mental affiliation, belonged rather to the age of Addison than to that of Macaulay.
Where, you asked, are the great creative energies? Well; in the West, certainly, they have flowed most where they can most be seen as energies. I think, through channels nearer this material plane: nearer the plane of intellect, at any rate. No: there is no question where the sheer brain force has been: it has been in the West. But then, where was it more manifest, in Pope or in Keats?
After a leisurely breakfast, enlivened by talk and laughter, the cabin windows open, the sun shining, the freshening breeze blowing in, Lesbia and Don Gomez went on deck, and he reclined at her feet while she read to him from the pages of her favourite Keats, read languidly, lazily, yet exquisitely, for she had been taught to read as well as to sing.
"The question really is whether, as art expands, the principles become fewer or more numerous. My own belief is that the principles do become fewer, but the varieties of expression more numerous. Keats tried to sum it up by saying, 'Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty'; but it is not a successful maxim, because, as a peevish philosopher said, 'Why in that case have two words for the same thing?"
But in the midst of regret, since all lovely examples lend their strength, since they give such grace even to the stern facts of suffering and death, and since there are too few such records on Heaven's scroll, be glad to know that for every throb of anguish, for every swooning lapse of pain, there was one beside her with tenderest hands, most careful eyes, most yearning and revering heart, one into whose sacred grief our intrusion is denied, but the remembrance of whose long and deep devotion shall endure while there are any to tell how Severn watched the Roman death-bed of Keats!
How hard it is to put oneself inside the crushing sense of failure that haunted Keats' last days, with death staring him in the face! Of course, one may say that a writer ought not to depend upon any consciousness of fame; that he ought to make his work as good as he can, and not care about the verdict.
The Canterbury Poets and Everyman's Library have less expensive editions. For selections, see Bronson, IV., 230-265; Ward, IV., 427-464; Oxford, 721-744; Century, 639-655; Manly, I., 413-425. By direct reference to the above poems, justify calling Keats "the apostle of the beautiful," in both thought and language. Give examples of his felicitous use of words and phrases.
No doubt it would have been satisfactory to Shelley if he could have found that Byron entertained or expressed any serious concern at Keats's premature death, and at the hard measure which had been meted out to him by critics. But on the whole Byron's feeling towards Keats was one of savage contempt during the young poet's life, and of bantering levity after his death. Here are some specimens.
"I doubt if I'll be able to appreciate Keats if this goes on," she meditated gloomily. And the people that went by, instead of being as usual mere provocation for her silent laughter, had to-day somehow got power over her and tormented her by making her suspect the worthlessness of her errand.
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