To an American, for example, the significance of a skylark is that Shelley sang it to skies where even it could never have mounted; and any one who has heard the nightingale must, if he be open-minded, confess its tremendous debt to
Keats: a tenth part genuine song, the rest moon, stars, silence, and John
Keats,--such is the nightingale.
But the odes of
Keats and of Wordsworth, a poem or two by Coleridge, a few more by Shelley, discovered vast realms of the spirit that none had explored before.
Under the name of Adonais, he mourns for the death of another poet, John
Keats, who died at twenty-six.
Hilbery sat editing his review, or placing together documents by means of which it could be proved that Shelley had written "of" instead of "and," or that the inn in which Byron had slept was called the "Nag's Head" and not the "Turkish Knight," or that the Christian name of
Keats's uncle had been John rather than Richard, for he knew more minute details about these poets than any man in England, probably, and was preparing an edition of Shelley which scrupulously observed the poet's system of punctuation.
The poem of [98] "Resolution and Independence" is a storehouse of such records; for its fulness of lovely imagery it may be compared to
Keats's "Saint Agnes' Eve." To read one of his greater pastoral poems for the first time is like a day spent in a new country; the memory is crowded for a while with its precise and vivid incidents:--
--
KEATS THE main characteristic of this volume consists in this, that all the stories composing it belong not only to the same period but have been written one after another in the order in which they appear in the book.
I already knew pretty well the origin of the Tennysonian line in English poetry; Wordsworth, and
Keats, and Shelley; and I did not come to Tennyson's worship a sudden convert, but my devotion to him was none the less complete and exclusive.
Not exactly up to the level of
Keats or Shakespeare -- even Anne was not so deeply in love as to think that.
"Not being a genius, like
Keats, it won't kill me," she said stoutly, "and I've got the joke on my side, after all, for the parts that were taken straight out of real life are denounced as impossible and absurd, and the scenes that I made up out of my own silly head are pronounced `charmingly natural, tender, and true'.
You can read the magazines for a thousand years and you won't find the value of one line of
Keats. Leave fame and coin alone, sign away on a ship to-morrow, and go back to your sea."
But here we are at the Albany, and I hope there's some fire left; for I don't know how you feel, Bunny, but for my part I'm as cold as
Keats's owl."
"Did you ever read
Keats's Belle Dame sans Merci?" asked Mrs.
Keats - Englishman and romantic poet (1795-1821)