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 was infinitely greater than is immediately apparent.  Keats is engaged in a war on two fronts:  he is struggling against the Miltonic manner, and struggling also to deal with an unfamiliar content.  The whole direction of his poetic purpose had shifted since he wrote ‘Hyperion.’  ‘Hyperion,’ though far finer as art, had been produced by an impulse substantially the same as ‘Endymion’; it was an exercise in a manner.  Keats desired to prove to himself, and perhaps a little at that moment to prove to the world, that he was capable of Miltonic discipline and grandeur.  It was, most strictly, necessary for him to be inwardly certain of this.  He had drunk, as deeply as any