helped him devise the stanzas used in his Odes. In the couplets ofEndymion and the
blank-verse of the unfinished Hyperion, his fertile mind tends to run on: his imagi-
nation responded impetuously to sensuous beauty, in women, in nature or in art,
and in verse and language themselves. Stanza-form controlled his sentences and
concentrated his thought, and his late unstanzaic poems,Lamia and The Fall of
Hyperion, are less diffuse. The first critics ofEndymion wanted him to control his
aestheticism – ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’, it begins. They found his explicit
sensuousness cloying. But Keats did not need to be told that aesthetic joy passes. In
1816 he had asked in Sleep and Poetry, ‘And can I ever bid these joys farewell? / Yes,
I must pass them for a nobler life, / Where I may find the agonies, the strife / Of
human hearts.’ He had already lost his mother to the tuberculosis which was later to
claim his brother Tom and himself.
Sleep and Poetry is a title which points to Keats’s lasting concern about the moral-
ity of imagination, and the complex relationships between art and experience. In his
last major work,The Fall of Hyperion, he is told that ‘The poet and the dreamer are
distinct,/Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes. / The one pours out a balm upon
the world, / The other vexes it.’ In The Eve of St Agnes he produced perhaps the
most coherent of all the symbolic legends invented by the Romantic poets. Using a
medieval romance setting and the Spenserian stanza, Keats brings together young
lovers from feuding families, a situation found in The Lay of the Last Minstrel and
Christabel. The end is neither tragic, as in Romeo and Juliet, nor, as in Scott or in
Coleridge’s intended ending, happy. Porphyro conceals himself in Madeline’s bed-
chamber until Madeline is asleep. The couple consummate their love, though
Madeline may not know that what is happening is real:
Into her dream he melted, as the rose
Blendeth its odour with the violet, –242 7 · THE ROMANTICS: 1790–1837
John Keats (1795–1821) after a sketch by
B(enjamin) R(obert) Haydon, a pen-and-ink
drawing, above An(no) 1816, and a more
classically idealized sketch, crossed out.