The quickness of his development is one of the most amazing facts in literary history. He was twenty-three when Endymion was published, but in the next eighteen months he had almost finished his life's work. In that brief time, he perfected his art and wrote poems that rank among the greatest of their kind, and that have influenced the work of many succeeding poets, such as Tennyson, Lowell, and Swinburne.
[Illustration: ENDYMION. From mural painting by H.O. Walker,
Congressional Library, Washington, D.C.]
Nearly all his greatest poems were written in 1819 and published in his 1820 volume. The Eve of St. Agnes (January, 1819) and the Ode to a Nightingale (May, 1819) are perhaps his two most popular poems; but his other masterpieces are sufficiently great to make choice among them largely a matter of individual preference.
The Eve of St. Agnes is an almost flawless narrative poem, romantic in its conception and artistic in its execution. Porphyro, a young lover, gains entrance to a hostile castle on the eve of St. Agnes to see if he cannot win his heroine, Madeline, on that enchanted evening. The interest in the story, the mastery of poetic language, the wealth and variety of the imagery, the atmosphere of medieval days, combine to make this poem unusually attractive. The following lines appeal to the senses of sight, odor, sound, and temperature,[25] as well as to romantic human feeling and love of the beautiful:—
"…like a throbbing star
Seen mid the sapphire heaven's deep repose;
Into her dream he melted, as the rose
Blendeth its odor with the violet,—
Solution sweet: meantime the frost-wind blows
Like Love's alarum pattering the sharp sleet
Against the window panes; St. Agnes' moon hath set."
The fact that Keats could write the Ode to a Nightingale in three hours is proof of genius. This poem pleases lovers of music, of artistic expression, of nature, of romance, and of human pathos. Such lines as these show that the strength and beauty of his verse are not entirely dependent on images of sense:—
"Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath."
The Ode on a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, La Belle Dame sans Merci, Ode on Melancholy, Lamia, and Isabella,—all show the unusual charm of Keats. He manifests the greatest strength in his unfinished fragment Hyperion, "the Götterdämmerung of the early Grecian gods." The opening lines reveal the artistic perfection of form and the effectiveness of the sensory images with which he frames the scene:—
"Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,
Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung about his head
Like cloud on cloud."
General Characteristics.—Keats is the poetic apostle of the beautiful. He specially emphasizes the beautiful in the world of the senses; but his definition of beauty grew to include more than mere physical sensations from attractive objects. In his Ode to a Grecian Urn, he says that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," and he calls to the Grecian pipes to play—