KEATS AT HOME
THE GRAVE OF KEATS
Keats died in Rome on February 23, 1821, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery. His last request was that on his tombstone there be carved, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
The poets of the first quarter of the last century died young: Byron at thirty-six, Shelley at thirty, Keats at twenty-six. What Byron’s future would have been no one will venture to predict; but Shelley and Keats were rapidly gaining in power when the end came. The first was the fiery leader of revolt, the second was the idealist, concerned, not with present oppressive traditions, but with untrammeled freedom of thought and of life.
Keats cared for none of these things: he was in love with beauty. One must go back to Spenser to find an Englishman of his sensitiveness to beauty, and he was much simpler than Spenser, whose moral idealism expressed itself in a refined symbolism. Keats was the son of a stable keeper, went to school for a few years, and was conspicuous chiefly for his pugnacious disposition. The impression that he was a weak, sentimental boy and man is without foundation. He became the victim of a heart-breaking disease; but his was essentially a brave and manly nature.
THE LIFE MASK OF KEATS
Attributed to Haydon by the artist Joseph Severn. From a cast made in New York, presumably from a cast of the original. An electrotype of the mask is in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
His later work is notable not only for its beauty, but for its solidity of texture. He became an apprentice to a surgeon. Through his acquaintance with a family of cultivated people he became a reader of good books, and discovered his vocation when he opened the “Faerie Queene.” That poem did not make him a poet: it opened his eyes to the fact that he was a poet. “Endymion,” published when he was twenty-three years old, was immature in construction and diction; but it was the first bloom of a beautiful genius. “Hyperion,” which came near the end, is a fragment, for he was still very young in knowledge of life and the practice of art; but it has nobility and a certain largeness of handling that predict strength as well as art. The first line of “Endymion” showed where he stood as a poet, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” and on his deathbed he said, “I have loved the principle of beauty in all things.” He not only loved it, but gave it illustration in short poems of unsurpassed perfection. “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the “Ode to a Nightingale,” the “Ode to Autumn,” the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” have a deathless loveliness and are stamped by that finality of shape which marks the best pieces of Greek sculpture. Matthew Arnold said of these shorter poems that they had “that rounded perfection and felicity of loveliness of which Shakespeare is the great master.”