twenty pounds.1 This money, probably at George's solicitation, they sent to him at Margate. We can imagine George arriving at 93 Fleet Street with the dismal news that, far from being able to buy back his books, John was in actual need of money. It seems likely that this was the way of it, for, if John had written, doubtless his letter would have been preserved along with the others. His acknowledgement, written on May sixteenth, we have.

Keats's letter to Taylor and Hessey shows that already he was on the most friendly terms with them. After a somewhat pathetic attempt at playful joking, he adds, with characteristic frankness:

"I went day by day at my poem for a Month- at the end of which time the other day I found my Brain so overwrought that I had neither rhyme nor reason in it so was obliged to give up for a few days. I hope soon to be able to resume my work I have endeavoured to do so once or twice; but to no purpose. Instead of Poetry, I have a swimming in my head and feel all the effects of a Mental debauch, lowness of Spirits, anxiety to go on without the power to do so, which does not at all tend to my ultimate progression."

Keats calls Margate a "treeless affair," and perhaps the sea had woven itself too closely into his depression. It was not like the Summer before, when he had hankered after just the scenery which was to be found at Margate. His mood is utterly different now from what it was a year earlier, and Margate does not suit it. He wants - trees. Already, by May tenth, he had told Hunt: "I fancied that I should like my old lodging here, and could contrive to \do without trees... Tom is with me at present, and we are very comfortable. We intend, though, to get among some trees." As a postscript, he adds: "You shall hear where we move." Six days later, he has decided where to go. He tells Taylor and Hessey: "This evening I go to

1 Colvin. From information supplied by a great-niece of Taylor's.

Canterbury, having got tired of Margate. I was not right in my head when I came. At Canterbury I hope the remembrance of Chaucer will set me forward like a Billiard Ball."

On Friday, May sixteenth, then, Keats left Margate, seeking, as so many poets have done, an atmosphere which will put him into the frame of mind necessary for his work. The portmanteaux are hoisted in, the cloths are pulled off the horses, the whip cracks, the horn blows, and John and Tom Keats, and some hundreds of lines of Endymion, rattle away to Canterbury.

I have been in something of a quandary as to just how to deal with Endymion in the matter of time. It took Keats seven months to write the poem, and during those months he was moving from place to place, and his mind was in a constant flux and flow. To weave the poem in with his daily existence, as I have been trying to do with his poems hitherto, was manifestly impossible, if any continuity in the poem itself were to be preserved. It has seemed to me best, therefore, to abandon the strict chronological sequence in this instance, and devote a chapter to Endymion alone. Of course, in doing this, I have been obliged to make such reference to events, and to Keats's continual growth of thought, as have to do with the poem, reserving, however, the narrative proper for a succeeding chapter. How much Keats had written by the time he left Margate, we do not know. But it is clear that he had advanced a good way with the First Book. His life and mental experiences in Carisbrooke and in Margate are so much of a piece that no break could well be made between them. Now, however, we come to a pause, a pause because we have no letters to fill a gap of a month. That Keats wrote no letters for a month, it is impossible to conceive, but it is a fact that none have come to light. Here, then, seems the logical place to take up the long, and very difficult, poem which is Endymion.

CHAPTER V
ENDYMION

It is not hard to understand why Keats chose the story of Endymion for the subject of his contemplated long poem. Possible subjects for long poems fall roughly into five groups. These groups we may classify as mythological, historical, satirical, allegorical, and narrative pure and simple. If modern poetry were in question, another group might be added, the psychological, but psychology was unknown to science until very recently, and, however much psychology there was in the poetry of an earlier day, it worked under the cover of narrative or drama. Purely psychological poems such as Edwin Arlington Robinson's Avon's Harvest or Roman Bartholow, for instance, are a product of modern scientific thought. Taking these five groups one by one, we shall quickly see upon which Keats's choice was predestined to fall.

Historical poetry requires much knowledge and considerable research, and Keats, at this period, had neither the knowledge nor the patience necessary to hunt facts and laboriously combine them into an artistic whole. His reading had always been of the impressionistic order; to receive impressions, not to tabulate facts, was his aim, and it is the wisest aim for a budding poet. Not until the poetical view-point is so firmly fixed as to become a dependable habit, can youth engage in a long, conscious preparation of detail before starting to write. It may sound paradoxical, but it is a truth that Keats had to write, it would have been an ill-judged move on his part to have held off from actual writing for any preparation whatsoever. Time for that later on. We see, therefore, that a subject taken from history was out of the question.

For satire, a poet needs experience, experience of events

and persons. He also needs the possession of a certain state of mind. Keats's experience was of the slightest, and his state of mind was as far removed from the satirical as could well be. Satire is not a lover's tool, and Keats was fairly in love with poetry. Beauty and poetry were synonymous to him; it took years, and the flint of disappointment, to strike the spark of satire in his soul.

As to allegory, that was completely foreign to Keats's nature. There is no trace of allegory to be found anywhere in his works. The ingenious efforts of commentators to find allegorical meanings in Endymion and Hyperion have led to a great deal of interesting writing; but these tracts, as I may call them, are quite beside the mark, since they are invariably based upon the supposition that Keats was a type of man which any intimate study of his character proves that he was not. In the following analysis of Endymion, I have endeavoured to show how Keats really wrote the poem, basing my explanations entirely on his own statements and upon the known facts of his life and personality.

In speaking of narrative as a category by itself, I mean that kind of tale in verse which is concerned with men and women such as the poet may possibly have encountered in the flesh. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales comes under this heading, and so do many of Wordsworth's poems. Crabbe is an uninspired exemplar of the genre, as, in our own day, but with the quality of poetry added, are John Masefield and Robert Frost. One would suppose that Keats, while visiting Dr. Hammond's patients in Edmonton, or walking the London hospitals, must have come across scores of people whose lives would have given him abundance of material for just this sort of thing. The material may have lain before him as thick as hoar-frost on an Autumn morning, but it was not in him to react to it. Poetry, to Keats, was a thing of zest and glamour. Realist though he was, his realism confined itself to detail; it was

realism vitalizing romance, for Keats is one of the great romantics of literature. His dislike of Wordsworth's rural episodes was absolute and irrevocable. In a review of Reynolds's skit on Peter Bell, published in the Examiner in 1819, Keats says of the then anonymous author: "The more he may love the sad embroidery of the Excursion, the more he will hate the coarse samplers of Betty Foy and Alice Fell." Nobody can dislike Chaucer, but it was the great, sincere, straightforward and penetrating poet whom Keats admired, rather than the teller of tales. It is significant that the one poem of Chaucer's on which he was moved to compose was the apocryphal Floure and the Lefe. Besides, the centuries had invested Chaucer's everyday characters with a romantic aura.

Counting out the four groups of history, satire, allegory, and domestic narrative, we see that the only one of our five divisions which Keats could cope with in the Spring of 1817 was the mythological. Mythology had captivated him even in his school-days. There was Lemprière, which Clarke thinks he knew almost by heart. He was familiar with Sandys' translation of Ovid from the same early period, and the Elizabethan poets he had delved into were full of mythological allusions and suggestions. Since mythology was the only possible source from which he was fitted to draw inspiration for the poem he wished to write, the choice of the legend of Endymion was a foregone conclusion. I have already spoken of his peculiar and transcendental feeling for the moon. Realizing this, it is evident that the Endymion myth must have a peculiar attraction for him, and that he would undoubtedly attempt to write it as soon as he felt able to do so. It is also obvious that the Endymion drama was capable of becoming the expression of just those ideas which he had, somewhat haltingly, tried to express in I Stood Tip-toe and Sleep and Poetry. His little essay of it in the first of these two poems points clearly to his direction.