Keats, at first, by imitation, or through inexperience, rivalled the peay-greeny verdurousness of Hunt's urban rusticities,—which was unfortunate; and, as an intimate of Hunt, he was included by the noisy and brutal literary Tories of the Press in their assaults on the literary Radicals of "The Cockney School".
To appreciate Keats, and to understand the manly and resolute character which was falsely supposed to be effeminate, it is necessary to read his delightful correspondence. His first small volume of verse (1817) contains but occasional promise of his greatness; one suffices, the sonnet on first reading Chapman's Homer.
In "Endymion" (1818) he attempted a long narrative, holding that readers might like to wander here and there on Mount Latmos with him, even if they did not pursue the tale from cover to cover. Shelley declared that Keats seemed to have tried to make himself unreadable, and, indeed, if we read for the story's sake alone, we are more unfortunate than if we take up "Clarissa Harlowe" with the same purpose. On the other hand the frequent passages of beauty proclaim the author a poet, who has not yet arrived at his later perfection.
Keats was violently attacked as a Cockney and as an apothecary's boy, in "Blackwood's Magazine," and in "The Quarterly Review". These libels are as base as the assault on Coleridge in the "Edinburgh Review," though not nearly so abominable as what Byron wrote about Keats in private letters now published. The Scots who attacked Keats might have repented had they read his enthusiastically sympathetic appreciations of Burns, in the letters written during his tour north of the Border.
It was not criticism but the consumption which killed his brother Tom, increased in feverishness by a love affair, that slew John Keats, in Rome (13 February, 1821), a year after the publication of his third volume, "Lamia," which in brief compass contained verse that placed him in the first rank of the poets of England. His character had rapidly advanced in noble seriousness, high ambition, and sympathy with mankind. His best sonnets, as "On Reading Chapman's Homer," are on a level with the greatest by Milton and by Wordsworth. His "Odes to the Nightingale," to "Autumn," "On a Grecian Urn," and others have the classic beauty of Greek art of the Periclean age, with all the magic of romance, the mysterious charm of words that evoke visions of ineffable beauty. Romance herself inspires "La Belle Dame Sans Merci". Keats had divined and made his own all that is best in the Greek which he could not read, and in the early mediaeval French lyrics which in his day were unpublished.
In "The Pot of Basil" he exalts beyond itself the genius of Boccaccio, of a time when the classical revival was dawning in Italy, and in "Lamia" tells a story that had fascinated Burton in his "Anatomy of Melancholy". The fragment of "Hyperion," again, recalls Greek art as no other modern has succeeded in reviving its majestic simplicity, while the measure of "In a drear-nighted December" preludes to the music of Swinburne's "Garden of Proserpine".
In all that is best of Keats we look, as in his own poem, through
magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.
English non-dramatic poetry contains no greater example of pure inexplicable inspiration than the genius of Keats: while his character, some ebullitions of poetic youth, and of torturing ill-health apart, excites the strongest affection and admiration.