Five Centuries of English Verse Volume 2 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1913 edition. Excerpt: ... JOHN KEATS 1795--1821 Endymion surprised and shocked the lingering orthodoxy of late Georgian critics. Its author provoked as much animosity as Wordsworth, and more than Byron. Wordsworth bore no relation to the idols of their youth, Dryden and Pope. Byron, and Scott also, affected to revere both. Reviewers simply did not understand Shelley. Endymion was the worst of rebels. It had borrowed and travestied myths of the Greek Classics, and the metre of English Masters. Many real faults indeed may be found in it. The plot wanders, and perpetually loses itself. The narrative, often the descriptions, are prolix and tedious. The diction is troubled with strange words and phrases. The rhyme tends to lead the sense. Not rarely the ideas are thin in comparison with the parade of the circumstances meant to wait upon them. Occasionally the prosaic will obtrude itself; cotton-backing showing under velvet pile. But then the golden autumnal haze, the delicious uncertainty what visions of romance will next come and go from and into happy Dreamland The age was one of muddy perturbation--strifes of peoples against kings, and kings against peoples, of mortal struggles between agrarianism and feudalism, labour and capital, political economy and an outworn Faith. Imagine, for the few belated Elizabethans, the joy in this pageant of Olympian goddesses haunting the happy pastures of Arcadian hills It is in truth an Elizabethan poet's world. The Elizabethan idea of poetry breathes throughout. Laws of physical nature are suspended. Men ride on eagles' wings, walk the sea, and sojourn in ocean caves. No whisper of wranglings of statesmen, discontents, and hunger of the seething masses, stirs the serene solitude. Fields and woodlands are governed by no human...