Other poets have written Nightingales and Grecian Urns and Sonnets
and Mirth-and-Passion things: but _he_ wrote them in his glorious
and wistful pain. He wrote the sweet headaches of his spirit into
his delicate beaten-gold verse: the precious fevers of his mental
veins: the bone-aches and muscle-aches of his thoughts: the darling
skin-damps and palm-damps of his divine fancy:--all in the Song of
his lilied youth.
There is no poet but writes his poetry out of inner travails and
immense wistfulness. But they all write just beside their travail,
not in it: just beside their wistfulness, not with it. A poet
who feels the throat of his soul aching and swollen and inflamed
writes--not just that astral diphtheria, not till another time:
but instead the fine smothering of a hope, perhaps, the oblique
suffocating of a love. A poet whose brain-hands throb with some
horrible dulcet-ish tiredness from handling the heavy bright tools
of his craft writes instead the throbbing of his brain-soles and
brain-insteps from walking small odd hard rutted daily ways.
It rouses me--it heats my eyeballs with salty honeyed warmth as I
read: but it is not John Keats: who writes his own immediate magic
sickness in perfect sudden obvious blood-warm golden _Now_!
It is always old, old-fashioned ailment, worn of ages. The drowsy
ache of the Nightingale goes a thousand years back and a thousand
years to come: the restless ecstasy of a thousand thousand
Nightingales, one for each who reads, in any age, all ages. Long,
long after the jeweled English language is gone, dead as Homer’s,
Keats’s Nightingale will flutter lyric-winged in the nervous jeweled
lovely _Now_.
‘Weep for Adonis,’ wailed the differently-lovely Shelley, ‘he is
dead.’ But he isn’t dead. He is terribly living, passionately living.
Each day of my life I feel him living. He breathes. He breathes close
to me, pantingly, like a swimmer breasting waves or a playing child
in a summer day.--John Keats!
Just Beneath My Skin he is my God-of-the-World, my Fetich and my
Lover. He has been my Lover for seven gold years.
He is the first beauty in my flawed futile life. He is the most
beautiful thing in the living and dying world. John Keats--John
Keats!--
In everyone else I can feel mixed motives, tough tangled silk threads
of self woven into wonderful wefts of days and deeds: in _everybody_,
from Iscariot to Toussaint L’Ouverture, from Jeanne d’Arc to
Victoria Woodhull, from Paul of Tarsus to Aaron Burr.
Only John Keats stands out alone, a true-breathing Poet, an Inmost
Heart bleeding outward.
The lyric poet is the true poet. The lyric poet achieves no end in
his art. He turns fragments of light and life into terms of beauty
and sends them flying forth on flaming word-wings which translate
the smooth human flesh they brush-by into delicious flesh-of-gold,
flesh-of-petals, flesh-of-fire! But he makes no morals, teaches
no lessons, finishes nothing. It’s as it should be. Nothing _is_
finished. The mixed world is all unfinished, a glorified Mistake.
The race is a millionfold Mistake: lives it, breathes it, battens on
it--coarsely and finely and lamentably and musically and bravely.
So that all poetry which wanders from the lyric is only a play or
a picture or an airship or a cause which aims at _fait-accompli_,
attaining an object: it is limited and man-made: its beauty is lopped
off like boughs and branches after a storm: its wings are clipped.
Its distanceless spaces, little and large, are visibly engineered
by mathematic hands. But the lyric poetry is the true luminous and
bloody interpreting of humanness.
John Keats wrote by the lights of his living and he lived all his
days in joyous lyric anguish.
Once he wrote, ‘Ever let the Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home.’
It is a factful of himself--lawless, radical and non-civilized,
agleam in the mixed world. It is everybody--poets, burglars,
nursemaids: everybody. He wrote it in a hundred other ways, but it
is all in that: it is the lyric epitome of every day. Pleasure never
_is_ at home.
And ‘Heard melodies are sweet,’ he wrote, ‘but those unheard are
sweeter’--
There spoke the wild delicate wiseness of his brain and the
passionate delicate wonder of his heart.--John Keats! John Keats!
But everything he wrote, the Grecian Urn itself, is immeasurably less
lyric than himself writing it and being it.
He is rich bright-wet living lyric for this Me in this Now though he
has lain dead in Rome nearly the full hundred years.
My garbled life and my thinking hunger feed upon him.
He was the one human one who walked on in the way before him: not
around the jagged little stones and icy little pools that were in
it: but straight on through them all, though his lyric feet were
quivering shuddering sensitive, sensitive beyond knowledge of
commoner feet that walk around.
It fattens my leanest self to keep that in my constant remembrance.
The thought of his brave radiant loveliness reassures me to myself,
by the hour.
I am futile: but _he_ is mysteriously omnipotently useful and I catch
some of it from him.
I am half-full of vanity: but he is of a lustrous priceless vanity
himself that justifies mine and all the world’s.
I am fearing and false: but he is so brave, so true to infinite
form, that by it he leavens the lump of the whole world’s mendacious
cowardice.
My brain is full of wilding darknesses, snarled and knotted gifts
and penchants: but into _his_ strong brain the strong fresh
yellow rain-washed sun shines straight down--through the wide
twin-brightness of his Eyes. I look down his Eyes--twin public wells
(he belongs publicly and privately to all this mixed mad world, and
anyone may look!--)--I look into that titanic vibrant brain, and mine
catches some of it: a blest and precious Disease, oh, a rare Disease!
My Heart--my Heart feels strange and tired and dead, a bit of
dead-sea fruit: but _his_ heart, warm and real and boundlessly
unsatisfied, is always the deep quick fragrant Rose of this World.
A Hero!--a Poet-at-arms!--John Keats!
‘He has outsoared the shadow of our night,’ wrote that Shelley, and
wrote no truer word.
I have read so many of the strange and splendid things--bits of them:
Vergil and Homer and Villon and Goethe and all the English poets,
and prose writers like Carlyle who in places out-poet poets,--and
moderner ones and the new poets, imagists and others: John Keats
feels a noticeably braver thing, and always, always a little way
beyond. He is purely lyric.
When he loved a woman he loved the dubious fascinating Fanny Brawn--
sordid-brained, worldly: to him a mixed living devilish-glowing
goddess. A higher-souled woman would neither have so tortured nor
so held him. He was purely lyric. He cared truly nothing for the
verdicts of critics and reviewers: and in the sweet-lipped boyish
beauty of his youth they truly and easily killed him. It would be
like that--it had to be. He was so purely lyric.
He died in the sweet fierce dazzling cause of Beauty.
I have so many thoughts and my thoughts are always my own. There
are endless written thoughts deeper than mine--finer, stronger,
anything-you-like. But mine answer for me: no written thoughts affect
them, though they thrill my reading hours. Only John Keats’s thoughts
can enter in and crush and cripple mine.
Because everybody is a little bit like John Keats I have a starry
thin edge of faith inside me. He is food for my hunger of thought,
fire for my passion of life.--John Keats!