He expressed this faith very clearly in the early and uneven poem called “Sleep and Poetry,” in a passage which begins
“Oh, for ten years, that I may overwhelm
Myself in poesy! so I may do the deed
That my own soul has to itself decreed.”
And then, ere four years had followed that brave wish, his voice fell silent under a wasting agony of pain and love, and the daisies were growing upon his Roman grave.
The pathos of his frustrated hope, his early death, has sometimes blinded men a little, it seems to me, to the real significance of his work and the true quality of his influence in poetry. He has been lamented in the golden verse of Shelley’s “Adonaïs,” and in the prose of a hundred writers who have shared Shelley’s error without partaking of his genius, as the loveliest innocent ever martyred by the cruelty of hostile critics. But, in fact, the vituperations of Gifford and his crew were no more responsible for the death of Keats, than the stings of insects are for the death of a man who has perished of hunger on the coast of Labrador. They added to his sufferings, no doubt, but they did not take away his life. Keats had far too much virtue in the old Roman sense—far too much courage, to be killed by a criticism. He died of consumption, as he clearly and sadly knew that he was fated to do when he first saw the drop of arterial blood upon his pillow.
Nor is it just, although it may seem generous, to estimate his fame chiefly by the anticipation of what he might have accomplished if he had lived longer; to praise him for his promise at the expense of his performance; and to rest his claim to a place among the English poets upon an uncertain prophecy of rivalry with Shakespeare. I find a far sounder note in Lowell’s manly essay, when he says: “No doubt there is something tropical and of strange overgrowth in his sudden maturity, but it was maturity nevertheless.” I hear the accent of a wiser and saner criticism in the sonnet of one of our American poets:
“Touch not with dark regret his perfect fame,
Sighing, ‘Had he but lived he had done so’;
Or, ‘Were his heart not eaten out with woe