When I think of any great poetical writer of the past (a realist is an
historian and obscures the cleavage by the record of his eyes) I
comprehend, if I know the lineaments of his life, that the work is the
man's flight from his entire horoscope, his blind struggle in the network
of the stars. William Morris, a happy, busy, most irascible man, described
dim colour and pensive emotion, following, beyond any man of his time, an
indolent muse; while Savage Landor topped us all in calm nobility when the
pen was in his hand, as in the daily violence of his passion when he had
laid it down. He had in his _Imaginary Conversations_ reminded us, as it
were, that the Venus de Milo is a stone, and yet he wrote when the copies
did not come from the printer as soon as he expected: "I have ... had the
resolution to tear in pieces all my sketches and projects and to forswear
all future undertakings. I have tried to sleep away my time and pass
two-thirds of the twenty-four hours in bed. I may speak of myself as a
dead man." I imagine Keats to have been born with that thirst for luxury
common to many at the outsetting of the Romantic Movement, and not able,
like wealthy Beckford, to slake it with beautiful and strange objects. It
drove him to imaginary delights; ignorant, poor, and in poor health, and
not perfectly well-bred, he knew himself driven from tangible luxury;
meeting Shelley, he was resentful and suspicious because he, as Leigh Hunt
recalls, "being a little too sensitive on the score of his origin, felt
inclined to see in every man of birth his natural enemy."