The poems of Wordsworth, as he was the
most individual, accordingly reflect the moods of his own nature; those
of Keats, from sensitiveness of organization, the moods of his own taste
and feeling; and those of Byron, who was impressible chiefly through the
understanding, the intellectual and moral wants of the time in which he
lived. Wordsworth has influenced most the ideas of succeeding poets;
Keats, their forms; and Byron, interesting to men of imagination less for
his writings than for what his writings indicate, reappears no more in
poetry, but presents an ideal to youth made restless with vague desires
not yet regulated by experience nor supplied with motives by the duties
of life.
Keats certainly had more of the penetrative and sympathetic imagination
which belongs to the poet, of that imagination which identifies itself
with the momentary object of its contemplation, than any man of these
later days. It is not merely that he has studied the Elizabethans and
caught their turn of thought, but that he really sees things with their
sovereign eye, and feels them with their electrified senses. His
imagination was his bliss and bane. Was he cheerful, he "hops about the
gravel with the sparrows"; was he morbid, he "would reject a Petrarcal
coronation,--on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers.
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