[2] Cowden Clarke, writing many years later, suggests that this was Keats’s first acquaintance with Chaucer. He is certainly mistaken. It was on Feb. 27, 1817, that Keats called and found him asleep as related in the text. Within a week was published the volume of Poems, with the principal piece, Sleep and Poetry, partly modelled on the Floure and the Lefe itself and headed with a quotation from it. It is needless to add that later criticism does not admit The Floure and Lefe into the canon of Chaucer’s works.
CHAPTER IV
THE ‘POEMS’ OF 1817
Spirit and chief contents of the volume—Sonnets and rimed heroics—The Chapman sonnet—The ‘How many bards’ sonnet—The sex-chivalry group—The Leigh Hunt group—The Haydon pair—The Leander sonnet—Epistles—History of the ‘heroic’ couplet—The closed and free systems—Marlowe—Drayton—William Browne—Chapman and Sandys—Decay of the free system—William Chamberlayne—Milton and Marvell—Waller—Katherine Philips—Dryden—Pope and his ascendency—Reaction: The Brothers Warton—Symptoms of Emancipation—Coleridge, Wordsworth and Scott—Leigh Hunt and couplet reform—Keats to Mathew: influence of Browne—Calidore: influence of Hunt—Epistle to George Keats—Epistle to Cowden Clarke—Sleep and Poetry and I stood tiptoe—Analysis of Sleep and Poetry—Double invocation—Vision of the Charioteer—Battle-cry of the new poetry—Its strength and weakness—Challenge and congratulation—Encouragements acknowledged—Analysis of I stood tiptoe—Intended induction to Endymion—Relation to Elizabethans—Relation to contemporaries—Wordsworth and Greek Mythology—Tintern Abbey and the three stages—Contrasts of method—Evocation versus Exposition.
The note of Keats’s early volume is accurately struck in the motto from Spenser which he prefixed to it:—
| What more felicity can fall to creature Than to enjoy delight with liberty? |
The element in which his poetry moves is liberty, the consciousness of release from those conventions and restraints, not inherent in its true nature, by which the art had for the last hundred years been hampered. And the spirit which animates him is essentially the spirit of delight: delight in the beauty and activities of nature, in the vividness of sensation, in the charm of fable and romance, in the thoughts of friendship and affection, in anticipations of the future, and in the exercise of the art itself which expresses and communicates all these joys.
Technically considered, the volume consists almost entirely of experiments in two metrical forms: the one, the Italian sonnet of octave and sestet, not long fully re-established in England after being disused, with some exceptions, since Milton: the other, the decasyllabic or five-stressed couplet first naturalized by Chaucer, revived by the Elizabethans in all manner of uses, narrative, dramatic, didactic, elegiac, epistolary, satiric, and employed ever since as the predominant English metre outside of lyric and drama. The only exceptions in the volume are the boyish stanzas in imitation of Spenser,—truly rather of Spenser’s eighteenth century imitators; the Address to Hope of February 1815, quite in the conventional eighteenth century style and diction, though its form, the sextain stanza, is ancient; the two copies of verses To some Ladies and On receiving a curious Shell from some Ladies, composed for the Misses Mathew, about May of the same year, in the triple-time jingle most affected for social trifles from the days of Prior to those of Tom Moore; and the set of seven-syllabled couplets drafted in February 1816 for George Keats to send as a valentine to Miss Wylie. So far as their matter goes these exceptions call for little remark. Both the sea-shell verses and the valentine spring from a brain, to quote a phrase of Keats’s own,