Where wealth accumulates and men decay
—to Crabbe’s Poor House, Hall of Justice, Prison; to Blake’s lyrical laments over small chimney-sweeps, blackamoors, foundlings and all that are young and desolate and oppressed, and the vow to sweep away “these dark Satanic mills” (of which I shall have more to say by and by) “and build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.” Turn now to Keats and you are returned upon mere poetry, in the Latin sense of mere. Keats has no politics, no philosophy of statecraft, little social feeling: he is a young apostle of poetry for poetry’s sake.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
But of course, to put it solidly, that is a vague observation—to anyone whom life has taught to face facts and define his terms, actually an uneducated conclusion, albeit most pardonable in one so young and ardent. Let us, for a better, go on to the last and grandest word of his last, unfinished, poem:
“High Prophetess,” said I, “purge off
Benign, if so it please thee, my mind’s film.”
“None can usurp this height,” returned the Shade,
“But those to whom the miseries of this world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.”