There is no danger that Keats'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_.
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