Algernon C. Swinburne and Margaret Bryant

“ Keats has been promoted by modern criticism to a place beside Shakespeare. The faultless force and the profound subtlety of his deep and cunning instinct for the absolute expression of absolute natural beauty can hardly be questioned or overlooked; and this is doubtless the one main distinctive gift or power which denotes him as a poet among all his equals, and gives him a right to rank for ever beside Coleridge and Shelley. As a man, the two admirers who did best service to his memory were Lord Houghton and Matthew Arnold. ”

“ The simple force of spirit and style which distinguishes the genuine ballad manner from all spurious attempts at an artificial simplicity was once more at least achieved in his verses on the crowning creation of Scott’s humaner and manlier genius—Meg Merrilies. No little injustice has been done to Keats by such devotees as fix their mind’s eye only on the more salient and distinctive notes of a genius which in fact was very much more various and tentative, less limited and peculiar, than would be inferred from an exclusive study of his more specially characteristic work. ”

“ Somewhat too sensually sensitive Keats may have been in either capacity, but the nature of the man was as far as was the quality of the poet above the pitiful level of a creature whose soul could “let itself be snuffed out by an article”; and, in fact, owing doubtless to the accident of a death which followed so fast on his early appearance and his dubious reception as a poet, the insolence and injustice of his reviewers in general have been comparatively and even considerably exaggerated. ”

“ But if it must be said that he lived long enough only to give promise of being a man, it must also be said that he lived long enough to give assurance of being a poet who was not born to come short of the first rank. ”

“ But that there was a finer side to the man, even if considered apart from the poet, his correspondence with his friends and their general evidence to his character give more sufficient proof than perhaps we might have derived from the general impression left on us by his works; though indeed the preface to Endymion itself, however illogical in its obviously implied suggestion that the poem published was undeniably unworthy of publication, gave proof or hint at least that after all its author was something of a man. ”

“ The faculty of assimilation as distinguished from imitation, than which there can be no surer or stronger sign of strong and sure original genius, is not more evident in the most Miltonic passages of the revised Hyperion than in the more Shakespearian passages of the unrevised tragedy which no radical correction could have left other than radically incorrigible. ”

“ John Keats went to London to study at Guy’s and St Thomas’s hospitals, living at first alone at 8 Dean Street, Borough, and later with two fellow students in St Thomas’s Street. It does not appear that he neglected his medical studies, but his chief interest was turned to poetry. In March 1816 he became a dresser at Guy’s, but about the same time his poetic gifts were stimulated by an acquaintance formed with Leigh Hunt. ”

“ His youngest brother had developed consumption, and in March John went to Teignmouth to nurse him in place of his brother George, who had decided to sail for America with his newly married wife, Georgiana Wylie. In May (1818) Keats returned to London, and soon after appeared Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818) , bearing on the title-page as motto “The stretched metre of an antique song.” Late in June Keats and his friend Armitage Brown started on a walking tour in Scotland, vividly described in the poet’s letters. ”