ion
between his power of estimation, and the demand which such a genius as
that of Keats, and such work as the maturest which he produced, make
upon the estimating faculty. But this consideration cannot be allowed to
operate beyond a certain point: the estimate has to be given--and given
candidly and distinctly, however imperfectly. I shall therefore proceed
to express my real opinion of Keats's poems, whether an admiring opinion
or otherwise; and shall write without reiterating--what I may
nevertheless feel--a sense of the presumption involved in such a
process. I shall in the main, as in previous chapters, follow the
chronological order of the poems.

As we have seen, Keats began versifying chiefly under a Spenserean
influence; and it has been suggested that this influence remained
puissant for harm as well as for good up to the close of his poetic
career. I do not see much force in the suggestion: unless in this
limited sense--that Spenser, like other Elizabethan and Jacobean poets
his successors, allowed himself very considerable latitude in saying
whatever came into his head, relevant or irrelevant, appropriate or
jarring, obvious or far-fetched, simple or grandiose, according to the
mood of the moment and the swing of composition, and thus the whole
strain presents an aspect more of rich and arbitrary picturesqueness
than of ordered suavity. And Keats no doubt often did the same: but not
in the choicest productions of his later time, nor perhaps so much under
incitement from Spenser as in pursuance of that revolt from a factitious
and constrained model of work in which Wordsworth in one direction,
Coleridge in another, and Leigh Hunt in a third, had already come
forward with practice and precept. Making allowance for a few early
attempts directly referable to Spenser, I find, even in Keats's first
volume, little in which that influence is paramount. He seems to have
written because his perceptions were quick, his sympathies vivid in
certain directions, and his energies wound up to poetic endeavour. The
mannerisms of thought, method, and diction, are much more those of Hunt
than of Spenser; and it is extremely probable that the soreness against
Hunt which Keats evidenced at a later period was due to his perceiving
that that kindly friend and genial literary ally had misled him into
some poetic trivialities and absurdities, not less than to anything in
himself which could be taken hold of for complaint.

Keats's f