The Character and Poetry of Keats

THE CHARACTER AND POETRY OF KEATS ARCHIBALD LAMPMAN (With a prefatory note by E. K. BROWN) "The C~aracter and Poetry of Keats" was written on one hundred and thir!y-two large sheets, subse_quently bound into a notebook with flexible brown covers; the script is large .and bold, and there are scarcely any corrections; on the reverse of afew sheets there arefalse starts. The only study of Keats to which Lampman refers is Lord Houghton's Life and Letters of John Keats; and the principlQ. of organization in his essay is Houghton's; the chronological. The text he used for his quotations from the poems was·the A/dine (edited by Houghton), or some reprint of it; for the text of the letters he depended on Houghton's biography.,1 He does not quote from the letters to Fanny Bra. wne. .Keats was the strongest literary influence upon Lampman, except, p~rhaps, in th.e last years of his /if~· In 1891 he confessed in a_letter: "I am only just now getting quite clear of the spell of that marvellous person, and it has taken me ten years to do it. K_ eats has always had such afascinationfor me, and has so pcrmeate_d my whole mental outfit, ~hat I have an idea that he hasfound a sort offaint reincarnation in me."2 In the essay that follows, composed the year·before he made· this confession, Lampman gives his ripe judgment of Keats the poet and Keats the man. For the man, whose life in several respects was significantly like his own, he felt an intimate sympathy and a reuerent respect. For the student of Lampman the man and Lampman the poet his opinions of Keats are of bigh importance. In Professor Carl Connor's .biography some aspects of the essay are summarized;3 but it is. now thought .~i.se to make a large part of the text available.4 In the pages that follow much more than one half of the text is reproduced. Most of the omissions are ofpassages quotedfrom the poems or the letters, or of accounts of material happen_ings in .](eats' life, based on Houghton and other ear.ly biographers. Nothing that has been omitted could significantly alter the bearing of the appreciations and estim_ates of individual poems of which, apart from the introduction, these extracts principally consist. A jew words of comment, set down in passing, on various poems which did not arrest Lampman 's attention are the only ·references to poems that have not been reproduced. It is clear that Lampman wrote the earlier parts of the essay on the scale of a somewhat longer work, and that as he drew towards a clo!e he made both his quotations and comments briefer. He is not the first interpreter of Keats, nor the last, to give a disproportionate emphasis to the collection of 1817 and to IThe quotations have been corrected and are given as in H. W. Garrod's text for the poems and M. B. Forman's text for the letters. 2See Lyrics of Eart/1, ed. by Duncan Campbell Scott (1925), 31-2. 3Carl Connor, Archibald Lampman, Canadian Po;i of Nature (1929), 139-42. 4The punctuation has been altered for clarity at many points. The few words which have been supplied here and there to complete the sense have becJl set within square brackets. . 356 THE CHARACTER AND POETRY OF KEATS 357 Endymion. The passages on Endymion and on the odes are studded with happy and suggestive phrases such as only a kindred spirit could find. They enrich the treasury of Keats-criticism. The son-in-law and daughter of Archibald Lampman, Mr. and Mrs. T. R. Loftus Mac]nnes, have kindly consented to the publication of the extracts. The manusc1·ipt is in their possession. I THERE are two sayings of John Keats which have passed upon all men's tongues, and made their way into the inner treasury of the English language. They have becom~ proverbial. ·One is the first line of Endymion, "A thing of Beauty is a joy forever," and the other the two last lines of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn": Beauty is...