And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.
Ode on a Grecian Urn
(c) Keats’s lyrical faculty is limited. When brooding over his woes he can utter a complaint on the true lyrical note. Hence we obtain such results as his wonderful last sonnet and La Belle Dame sans Merci, which is a lyric thinly disguised as a ballad. He was perhaps physically unable to experience the healthier joys of Burns, and so was incapable of expressing them.
(d) His Influence. A single glance at the table at the head of this chapter will show how piteously short was his poetical career; but, short as it was, his labor created a larger school than that of any of his contemporaries. His tradition was carried on by Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites, and to this day his influence is strong in English poetry.
OTHER POETS
1. Robert Southey (1774–1843). Southey was born at Bristol, educated at Westminster School and at Oxford, and settled down to lead the laborious life of a man of letters. He produced a great mass of work, much of which is of considerable merit, and he ranked as one of the leading writers of his age. Most of his work was written at Greta Hall, near Keswick, where he lived most of his life. He was made Poet Laureate in 1813. His reputation, especially as a poet, has not been maintained.
His poems, which are of great bulk, include Joan of Arc (1798), Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), The Curse of Kehama (1810), and Roderick the Goth (1814); they are pretentious in style and subject, but are now almost forgotten. Some shorter pieces, such as The Holly-tree, The Battle of Blenheim, and The Inchcape Rock, are still in favor, and deservedly so.
His numerous prose works include The History of Brazil (1810–19) and The Peninsular War (1822–33). The slightest of them all, The Life of Nelson (1813), is the only one now freely read. It shows Southey’s easy yet scholarly style at its best.