s's poetry
will not be appreciated; the danger is that Keats may not be understood.
And precisely this moment is opportune for understanding him. As Mr T.S.
Eliot has lately pointed out, the development of English poetry since
the early nineteenth century was largely based on the achievement of two
poets of genius, Keats and Shelley, who never reached maturity. They
were made gods; and rightly, had not poets themselves bowed down to
them. That was ridiculous; there is something even pitiful in the
spectacle of Rossetti and Morris finding the culmination of poetry, the
one in 'The Eve of St Agnes,' the other in 'La Belle Dame sans Merci.'
And this undiscriminating submission of a century to the influence of
hypostatised phases in the development of a poet of sanity and genius is
perhaps the chief of the causes of the half-conscious, and for the most
part far less discriminating, spirit of revolt which is at work in
modern poetry.

A sense is abroad that the tradition has somehow been snapped, that
what has been accepted as the tradition unquestioningly for a hundred
years is only a _cul de sac_. Somewhere there has been a substitution.
In the resulting chaos the twittering of bats is taken for poetry, and
the critically minded have the grim amusement of watching verse-writers
gain eminence by imitating Coventry Patmore! The bolder spirits declare
that there never was such a thing as a tradition, that it is no use
learning, because there is nothing to learn. But they are a little
nervous for all their boldness, and they prefer to hunt in packs, of
which the only condition of membership is that no one should ask what it
is.

At such a juncture, if indeed not at all times, it is of no less
importance to understand Keats than to appreciate his poetry. The
culmination of the achievement of the Keats to be understood is not the
Odes, perfect as they are, nor the tales--a heresy even for objective
criticism--nor 'Hyperion'; but precisely that revised Induction to
'Hyperion' which on the other argument is held to indicate how the
poet's powers had been ravaged by disease and the pangs of unsatisfied
love. On the technical side alone the Induction is of extraordinary
interest. Keats's natural and proper revulsion from the Miltonic style,
the deliberate art of which he had handled like an almost master, is
evident but incomplete; he is hampered by the knowledge that the virus
is in his blood. The creative effort of the Induction