A Choice of Keats’s Verse

‘Art’, a distinguished American critic has recently said, ‘is not quite so autonomous as twentieth-century criticism likes to think.’ Unlike Wordsworth, for whom he had a great respect though his poetic aims were so different, Keats was at no period of his short life so emotionally caught up in public affairs as Wordsworth had once been. His poetry was untouched by politics as it was untouched by orthodox religion. He was the nearest thing to a ‘pure poet’ in the England of his time. But this is not to say that his poetry can best be considered in isolation from the events and influences of his life: without the Letters, for instance, the finest ever written by an English poet, we should miss vital clues to the quality of his mind – the vivacity, vigor and profound originality of thought which enabled a bookish but unsophisticated young man to lift himself from the meek artificiality of his early works and break through into the larger world of ‘Hyperion’ and the Odes.