XIV.—The Real Tragedy of Keats

Extract

“But the crown

Of all my life was utmost quietude” (Endymion, III).

Keats' central instinct was for high poetic repose: for the quietude that comes, not from avoiding life, but from surmounting it. The goal, however, was so far beyond his reach that he could not have attained it, I think, even if he had lived a full lifetime. His early death (February 23, 1821) is bound to lose, as the centuries revolve upon that day, much of its tragic color; but at the same time the deeper tragedy of his spirit can appear more distinctly. This deeper tragedy has been considerably dimmed in the atmosphere of uniqueness with which the poet has been invested by the rising admiration of a hundred years. The other chief poets of the past century are now seen more or less clearly in their true boundaries; Keats' limits have been kept uniquely vague. His poetic potentiality and his ruining fate have been so continually balanced against each other, with insensible additions now on one side of the scale and now on the other, that both have come to appear much weightier than they really were. In particular it has been assumed with extraordinary unanimity that Keats' physical disintegration, beginning eighteen months before his death, stopped his progress just as he was approaching a much higher level of poetic achievement.