One bit of Wordsworth's mountain turf
is worth them all.
By the death of John Keats (1796-1821), whose elegy Shelley sang in
_Adonais_, English poetry suffered an irreparable loss. His _Endymion_,
1818, though disfigured by mawkishness and by some affectations of
manner, was rich in promise. Its faults were those of youth, the faults
of exuberance and of a sensibility, which time corrects. _Hyperion_,
1820, promised to be his masterpiece, but he left it unfinished--"a
Titanic torso"--because, as he said, "there were too many Miltonic
inversions in it." The subject was the displacement by Phoebus Apollo of
the ancient sun-god, Hyperion, the last of the Titans who retained his
dominion. It was a theme of great capabilities, and the poem was begun
by Keats with a strength of conception which leads to the belief that
here was once more a really epic genius, had fate suffered it to mature.
The fragment, as it stands--"that inlet to severe magnificence"--proves
how rapidly Keats's diction was clarifying. He had learned to string up
his loose chords. There is nothing maudlin in _Hyperion_; all there is
in whole tones and in the grand manner, "as sublime as Aeschylus," said
Byron, with the grave, antique simplicity, and something of modern
sweetness interfused.
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