In the following winter, Keats was able to make study, too, of Shakespeare on the stage; he even acted as dramatic critic in The Champion on one or two occasions, during his friend Reynolds’ absence. Criticising Retribution: or, the Chieftain’s Daughter, a forgotten and a very poor play, in which Macready acted at Covent Garden Theatre, in January 1818, Keats breaks into this most unaccustomed dramatic-critic’s vein:—

“What exquisite names did our old dramatists christen their plays withal! The title of an old play gives us a direct taste and surmise of its inwards, as the first lines of the Paradise Lost smack of the great Poem. The names of old plays are Dantean inscriptions over the gates of hell, heaven or purgatory. Some of such enduring pathos that in these days we may not for decency utter them, ‘honor dishonorable’! In these days we may but think of passion’s seventh heaven, and but just mention how crystalline the third is. The old dramatists and their title-pages are old Britain kings and their provinces. The fore page of a love play was ever ‘to Cupid’s service bowed,’ as The Mad Lover, The Broken Heart—or spake its neighbourhood to the ‘shores of old romance,’ as The Winter’s Tale, The Two Noble Kinsmen.”

One sees from this that Keats could never have become a mere formal, exemplary critic and reviewer. One is driven by it to speculate, too, about his future service as a dramatic poet, had he only lived. For the poor plays he wrote with Brown looking on, are no index to the range of his dramatic powers; and that he was potential on this side, too, no one who reads his poetry can doubt.

The fact is, if you will re-read his poems, in the light of his biography and his letters, the immensity of the reserve fund of powers casually indicated or half revealed, which he carried to his grave with him, must impress itself on you at point after point. He began by a fashion of verse which depends on an ornamentation in words and fanciful ideas. Compare him with that austere Cumbrian, Leigh Hunt’s opposite, to whom at first he felt antipathetic, and you see his early disposition. He brought splendid clothes to poetry; while Wordsworth worked with the very bones of language, with organic simplicity, and sometimes then thought an old coat good enough for the lyric muse. But Keats was content, like Wordsworth, to turn to Milton; and you realise his latent strength in that discipleship. You realise it too in his confession, as he stands at the feet of Homer:—

You realise it too by this boyish confession of faith, uttered in all the simplicity of his heart, in one of his letters to Reynolds:—

“I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the truth of Imagination. What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth, whether it existed before or not;—for I have the same idea of all our passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty. In a word, you may know my favourite speculation by my first book, and the little song I sent in my last, which is a representation from the fancy of the probable mode of operating in these matters. The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream: he awoke and found it truth. I am more zealous in this affair, because I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consecutive reasoning— and yet [so] it must be. Can it be that even the greatest philosopher ever arrived at his goal without putting aside numerous objections? However it may be, O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts! It is “a Vision in the form of Youth,” a shadow of reality to come—and this consideration has further convinced me—for it has come as auxiliary to another favourite speculation of mine—that we shall enjoy ourselves hereafter by having what we called happiness on earth repeated in a finer tone. And yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in sensation, rather than hunger, as you do, after Truth. Adam’s dream will do here, and seems to be a conviction that Imagination and its empyreal reflection is the