The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

No man had ever mastered language, or used it with such lordly abandon. Anglo-Saxon words, French words, Latin words, alehouse words, medical words, legal words; tripping monosyllabic lines and sonorous sesquipedalian speech; pretty ladylike euphuisms and rough idiomatic obscenities: only an Elizabethan could have dared to write such English. We have better manners now, and less power.Yes, the plots are impossible, as Tolstoi said; the puns are puerile, the errors of scholarship are un-Baconianly legion, and the philosophy is one of surrender and despair—it does not matter. What matters is that on every page is a godlike energy of soul, and for that we will forgive a man anything. Life is beyond criticism, and Shakespeare is more alive than life.

8. JOHN KEATS Let us pause for a moment, and count the great whom we have passed by unsung. First Sappho, flinging her lyric love from a Lesbian promontory; then Aeschylus and Sophocles, winning the Dionysian prize so many times oftener than Euripides; subtle Catullus, courtly Horace, lively Ovid, and mellifluous Virgil; Petrarch and Tasso, Omar-Fitzgerald, Chaucer and Villon. But this is small offense by the side of the sins we must yet commit; even Milton and Goethe are to be called but not chosen; even Blake and Burns, Byron and Tennyson, Hugo and Verlaine, Heine and Poe. Heine the imp of verse, and Poe the better half of poetry; to leave them out seems unforgivable. Tennyson, whose every song was beautiful, and Byron, whose very life was a lyric tragedy; who are the greater ones for whom these must make way? Worse yet, not to take Milton in, who wrote like princes, potentates, and powers, and made English to thunder and blare like the Hebrew of Isaiah. Worst of all, to leave Goethe aside, the very soul of Germany, who wrote in his youth like Heine, in his maturity like Euripides, and in his old age like a Gothic cathedral—confused and endlessly surprising; what good German, or good European, will put up with this? Never mind; let us sin bravely, and name not the philosopher Goethe, but the poet, John Keats.

Stricken down with consumption in 1819, Keats, after weeks in bed, wrote to Fanny Brawne: “Now I have had opportunities of passing nights anxious and awake, I have found thoughts obtrude upon me.‘If I should die,’ said I to myself,‘I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.’” “If I had had time”—this is the tragedy of all great men. Keats never wrote anything of importance after that; nevertheless, his friends are remembered because of him, and he has left behind him poems as immortal as English, and more perfect than Shakespeare.We shall say no more about him, but refresh ourselves with himself. He sings to the nightingale:

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

To take into the air my quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

In such an ecstasy!

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—

To thy high requiem become a sod.

And this to Melancholy:

She dwells with Beauty, Beauty that must die;

And Joy,whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu; and aching pleasure nigh,

Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips;

Ay, in the very temple of Delight,

Veil’d Melancholy was her sovran shrine;

Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;

His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,

And be among her cloudy trophies hung.