The peculiarities of Keats’s diction are, in the main, two-fold, and may each be traced to a direct influence: first, archaisms in the manner of Spenser[199] and Chatterton; second, colloquialisms and deliberate departures from established usage in the employment and formation of words, in imitation of Leigh Hunt. Keats’s theory so far as he had one, is set forth in a passage in one of his letters: “I shall never become attached to a foreign idiom, so as to put it into my writings. The Paradise Lost, though so fine in itself, is a corruption of our language. It should be kept as it is, unique, a curiosity, a beautiful and grand curosity, the most remarkable production of the world; a northern dialect accommodating itself to Greek and Latin inversions and intonations. The purest English, I think—or what ought to be the purest—is Chatterton’s.”[200]
Keats’s Poems of 1817 show Hunt’s influence in diction more strongly than any of his later works. In the majority of instances, this influence is reflected in the principles of usage rather than in the actual usages, although words and phrases used by Hunt are occasionally found in the writings of Keats. The tendency to a colloquial vocabulary is seen in such words and combinations as jaunty, right glad, balmy pain, leafy luxury,[201] delicious,[202] tasteful, gentle doings, gentle livers, soft floatings, frisky leaps, lawny mantle, patting, busy spirits. Among these words, leafy, balmy, lawny, patting, nest, tiptoe, and variations of “taste” were special favorites with Hunt. A few expressions only of this kind, as “nest,” “honey feel,” “infant’s gums,” are found in Endymion, and almost none at all in the later poems.
Keats used peculiar words with so much greater felicity and in so much greater profusion than Hunt, exceeding in richness and individuality of vocabulary most of the poets of his own time, that one is forced to believe that Spenser’s influence rather than Hunt’s was dominant here. Breaches of taste are confined almost entirely to the Poems of 1817.
Ordinary words used peculiarly include “nips” (they gave each other’s cheeks), “core” (for heart) and “luxury”[203] (with a wrong connotation), nouns and adjectives employed as verbs, and verbs as nouns and adjectives. These devices likewise cannot be credited to Hunt without reservation, since both Spenser and Milton used them; but there is little doubt that in this instance Hunt was an inciting and sustaining influence. Keats resorted to such artifices frequently and continued to do so to the end. Instances of nouns and adjectives employed as verbs are: pennanc’d, luting, passion’d, neighbour’d, syllabling, companion’d, labrynth, anguish’d, poesied, vineyard’d, woof’d, loaned, medicin’d, zon’d, mesh, pleasure, legion’d, companion, green’d, gordian’d, character’d, finn’d, forest’d, tusk’d, monitor. Verbs employed as nouns and adjectives are: shine, which occurs five times, feel, seeing, hush, pry and amaze.
More examples of coined compounds, nouns and adjectives, are to be found in Keats than in Hunt; in his better work as well as in his early productions. A few are: cirque-couchant, milder-mooned, tress-lifting, flitter-winged, silk-pillowed, death-neighing, break-covert, palsy-twitching, high-sorrowful, sea-foamy, amber-fretted, sweet-lipped, lush-leaved.
The last principle is the coining, or choice of, adjectives in y and ing; of adverbs in ly, when, in many instances, adjectives and adverbs already existed formed on the same stem. The frequent use of words with these weak endings gives a very diffuse effect at times in Keats’s early poems. The following are examples: fenny, fledgy, rushy, lawny, liny, nervy, pipy, paly, palmy, towery, sluicy, surgy, scummy, mealy, sparry, heathy, rooty, slumbery, bowery, bloomy, boundly, palmy, surgy, spermy, ripply, spangly, spherey, orby, oozy, skeyey, clayey, and plashy.[204] Adjectives in ing are: cheering, hushing, breeding, combing, dumpling, sphering, tenting, toying, baaing, far-spooming, peering (hand), searing (hand), shelving, serpenting. Adverbs are: scantly, elegantly, refreshingly, freshening (lave), hoveringly, greyly, cooingly, silverly, refreshfully, whitely, drowningly, wingedly, sighingly, windingly, bearingly.
These statements are not very conclusive proof of the frequent occurrences of the same words in the poems of the two men. They are questionable even in regard to the principles of usage themselves, since poets of the same period or young poets may possess the same tendencies. Yet in the light of their relations already discussed the similarity of a number of principles seems convincing proof that Hunt influenced Keats considerably in the principles of diction in his first volume and occasionally in the selection of individual words; and that Keats never entirely freed himself from some of Hunt’s peculiarities. Shelley, in writing of Hyperion to Mrs. Hunt, spoke of the “bad sort of style which is becoming fashionable among those who fancy that they are imitating Hunt and Wordsworth.”[205] Medwin reported Shelley as saying “We are certainly indebted to the Lakists for a more simple and natural phraseology; but the school that has sprung out of it, have spawned a set of words neither Chaucerian nor Spencerian (sic), words such as ‘gib,’ and ‘flush,’ ‘whiffling,’ ‘perking up,’ ‘swirling,’ ‘lightsome and brightsome’ and hundreds of others.”[206]
Keats, following the lead of Hunt, used the free heroic couplet in several of the 1817 poems with a license even greater than Hunt’s. In Endymion he indulged in further vagaries of rhythm and metre that Hunt never dreamed of and in fact greatly disapproved of. Hunt said that “Endymion had no versification.”[207] In its want of couplet and line units, this is not very far from the truth. Writing of it again in 1828, he says: “The great fault of Endymion next to its unpruned luxuriance, (or before it, rather, for it was not a fault on the right side,) was the wilfulness of its rhymes. The author had a just contempt for the monotonous termination of everyday couplets; he broke up his lines in order to distribute the rhyme properly; but going only upon the ground of his contempt, and not having settled with himself any principles of versification, the very exuberance of his ideas led him to make use of the first rhymes that offered; so that, by a new meeting of effects, the extreme was artificial, and much more obtrusive than the one under the old system. Dryden modestly thought, that a rhyme had often helped him to a thought. Mr. Keats in the tyranny of his wealth, forced his rhymes to help him, whether they would or not; and they obeyed him, in the most singular manner, with equal promptitude and ungainliness.”[208] Endymion has been thought by some critics, to have been written under the metrical influence of Chamberlayne’s Pharronida. In the number of run-on lines and couplets—a scheme nearer blank verse than the couplet—there is certainly a striking correspondence. Mr. Forman thinks that Keats knew the poem. Mr. Colvin and Mr. De Selincourt can see no real likeness. There is no proof as yet discovered that Keats ever heard of it.
In Lamia, after the extreme reaction in Endymion, Keats approached nearer to the classic form of the couplet used by Dryden, but still with greater freedom in structure than appears in either Dryden or Hunt. From the evidence of Brown it is probable that Keats imitated Dryden directly and not through the medium of Hunt’s work, but it is very likely that Hunt directed him there in the first instance for a model. Mr. Palgrave says of the metre of Lamia that Keats “admirably found and sustained the balance between a blank verse treatment of the ‘Heroic’ and the epigrammatic form carried to such perfection by Pope.”[209] Leigh Hunt said that “the lines seem to take pleasure in the progress of their own beauty like sea nymphs luxuriating through the water.”[210]
In conclusion, Keats’s early and late employment of the couplet was marked always by greater freedom in the use of run-on couplets and lines, and in the handling of the cæsura than Dryden’s or Hunt’s; he was at first slower than Hunt to employ the triplet and the Alexandrine, but he later adopted them in a larger measure; and he introduced the run-on paragraph and the hemistich independently of Hunt.