death to me. Miltonic verse cannot be written, but is the
verse of art. I wish to devote myself to another verse alone.'

More definite still is the letter of November 17, 1819, to his friend
and publisher, John Taylor:--

'I have come to a determination not to publish anything I have now
ready written; but for all that to publish a poem before long and
that I hope to make a fine one. As the marvellous is the most
enticing and the surest guarantee of harmonious numbers I have been
endeavouring to persuade myself to untether fancy and to let her
manage for herself. I and myself cannot agree about this at all.
Wonders are no wonders to me. I am more at home amongst Men and
Women. I would rather read Chaucer than Ariosto. The little dramatic
skill I may as yet have, however badly it might show in a Drama,
would, I think, be sufficient for a Poem. I wish to diffuse the
colouring of St Agnes Eve throughout a poem in which Character and
Sentiment would be the figures to such drapery. Two or three such
poems if God should spare me, written in the course of the next six
years would be a famous gradus ad Parnassum altissimum. I mean they
would nerve me up to the writing of a few fine plays--my greatest
ambition--when I do feel ambitious....'

No letter could be saner, nor more indicative of calm resolve. Yet the
precise determination is that nothing that went to make the 1820 volume
should be published, neither Odes, nor Tales, nor 'Hyperion.' This is
that mood of Keats which Sir Sidney Colvin, in his comment upon a
passage in the revised Induction, calls one of 'fierce injustice to his
own achievements and their value.' But a poet, if he is a real one,
judges his own achievements not by those of his contemporaries, but by
the standard of his own intention.

The evidence that Keats's mind had passed beyond the stage at which it
could be satisfied by the poems of the 1820 volume is overwhelming. His
letters to George of April, 1819, show that he was naturally evolving
towards an attitude, a philosophy, more profound and comprehensive than
could be expressed adequately in such records of momentary aspiration
and emotion as the Odes; though the keen and sudden poignancy that had
invaded them belongs to the new Keats. They mark the transition to the
new poetry which he vaguely discerned. The problem was to find the
method. The letters we have quoted to show his