Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?Hope is wrested from despair. The prophesied Spring is not physical nor simply
political, but moral and spiritual.
This too is the argument of Shelley’s eloquent Defence of Poetry, that love and
imagination, the sources of moral feelings, can be developed by poetry. The Defence
is a ranging and categorical answer to an ironic essay The Four Ages of Poetry (1820),
in which his friend Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1856) argued that the Romantics’
claims for poetry were brazenly exaggerated, and that modern poetry had declined
from the Silver Age poetry of the 18th century, itself feebler than the poetry of prim-
itive Golden Ages. Poetry naturally turns backwards: ‘While the historian and the
philosopher are advancing in, and accelerating, the progress of knowledge, the poet
is wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance. Mr Scott digs up the poachers
and cattle-stealers of the ancient border. Lord Byron cruises for thieves and pirates
on the shores of the Morea and among the Greek islands .... Mr Wordsworth picks
up village legends from old women and sextons ....’ Shelley’s unfinished Defence
combines Sidney’s arguments with the fervour of Wordsworth’s Preface, declaring
finally that ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.’ It was itself
unacknowledged, being published only in 1840. The most influential British
philosopher of the 19th century, the Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham (1772–1832),
thought poetry trivial and unnecessary. (Bentham wrote in an unpublished manu-
script ofc.1780: ‘The difference between prose and poetry [is that] ... prose begins
at the left-hand margin and continues to the right ... while in poetry some of the
lines fall short.’)
John Keats
John Keats(1795–1821), son of the manager of a London livery stables, attended not
Et on or Harrow but Enfield School, a Dissenting academy. Here he learned much
English poetry before leaving at 15, already the head of his family. At 20 he qualified
at Guy’s Hospital as an apothecary-surgeon, but decided to be a poet. Through Leigh
Hunt (1784–1859),editor of the liberal Examiner, he met Hazlitt, Lamb and Shelley.
His 4000-line Endymion (1818) was censured in the Tory quarterlies. His Poems
appeared in 1820. He died in Rome in 1821, of tuberculosis.
Keats’s reputation rose at his death and has not fallen. His gift is clear in ‘On First
Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ (1816). His notable trials in the sonnet form
THE ROMANTIC POETS 241