of his contemporaries, of the tradition; he needed to know that he had assimilated what he had drunk, that he could employ a conscious art as naturally as the most deliberate artist of the past, and, most of all, that he would begin, when he did begin, at the point where his forerunners left off, and not at a point behind them.  These necessities were not present in this form to Keats’s mind when he began ‘Hyperion’; most probably he began merely with the idea of holding his own with Milton, and with a delight in an apt and congenial theme.  Keats was not a poet of definite and deliberate plans, which indeed are incident to a certain tenuity of soul; his decisions were taken not by the intellect, but by the being.

He dropped ‘Hyperion’ because it was inadequate to the whole of him.  He was weary of its deliberate art because it interposed a veil between him and that which he needed to express; it was an imposition upon himself.

’I have given up “Hyperion”—­there were too many Miltonic inversions in it—­Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather artist’s, humour.  I wish to give myself up to other sensations.  English ought to be kept up.  It may be interesting to you to pick out some lines from “Hyperion” and a mark + to the false beauty proceeding from art and one || to the true voice of feeling....’—­(Letter to J.H.  Reynolds, Sept. 22, 1819.)

That outwardly negative reaction is packed with positive implications.  ‘English ought to be kept up’ meant, on Keats’s lips, a very great deal.  But there is other and more definite authority for the positive direction in which he was turning.  To his brother George he wrote, at the same time:—­

    ’I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton.  Life to him
    would be 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