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JOHN KEATS
HIS LIFE AND POETRY
HIS FRIENDS CRITICS
AND
AFTER-FAME
BY
SIDNEY COLVIN
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1917
COPYRIGHT
GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
S. C.
TO
F. C.
PREFACE
To the name and work of Keats our best critics andscholars have in recent years paid ever closer attentionand warmer homage. But their studies have for themost part been specialized and scattered, and theredoes not yet exist any one book giving a full and connectedaccount of his life and poetry together in thelight of our present knowledge and with help of allthe available material. Ever since it was my part,some thirty years ago, to contribute the volume onKeats to the series of short studies edited by LordMorley, (the English Men of Letters series), I havehoped one day to return to the subject and do mybest to supply this want. Once released from officialduties, I began to prepare for the task, and throughthe last soul-shaking years, being over age for anyeffectual war-service, have found solace and occupationin carrying it through.
The following pages, timed to appear in the hundredthyear after the publication of Keats’s first volume, arethe result. I have sought in them to combine two aimsnot always easy to be reconciled, those of holding theinterest of the general reader and at the same time ofsatisfying, and perhaps on some points even informing,the special student. I have tried to set forthconsecutively and fully the history of a life outwardlyremarkable for nothing but its tragic brevity, butinwardly as crowded with imaginative and emotionalexperience as any on record, and moreover, owingto the open-heartedness of the man and to the preservationand unreserved publication of his letters,lying bare almost more than any other to our knowledge.Further, considering for how much friendshipcounted in Keats’s life, I have tried to call up thegroup of his friends about him in their human lineamentsand relations, so far as these can be recovered,more fully than has been attempted before.I believe also that I have been able to trace moreclosely than has yet been done some of the chiefsources, both in literature and in works of art, of hisinspiration. I have endeavoured at the same time tomake felt the critical and poetical atmosphere, with itsvarious and strongly conflicting currents, amid whichhe lived, and to show how his genius, almost ignored inits own day beyond the circle of his private friends, wasa focus in which many vital streams o