Early in October he returned to London, determined to take lodgings by himself and look for work on the Press; a single visit to the Brawnes broke down his resolution, and he was soon back at the Browns' house again, unable to think of anything else. Though his disease was still undisclosed, his genius was now de clining under the double strain, as the rest of his work shows. Kean accepted Otho, but his manager proposed too long a delay to suit Keats and Brown, and the plan dropped. Keats now started the Cap and Bells, but the plan of the work was never congenial to him ; he was not designed for a satirist. Later he attempted to recast Hyperion in the form of a vision. The new version is not on the level of the old, but throws interesting light on the state of his thoughts at the time, and his conception of the function of poetry: Only the dreamer venoms all his days Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve.
On February 3, 1820, he had the first attack of consumption; Brown has left an account of how he realised from the first moment that it was his death-warrant. From then on the disease ran the usual course of rally and relapse until the end. In April he was better, and in May he moved to Kentish Town, near Leigh Hunt. In July the last great volume came out, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and other Poems, which contains all his work of major importance, except On Indolence, The Eve of St. Mark, and La Belle Dame sans Merci, which first appeared in the Indicator, May 20. He was nursed through the summer, first by the Hunts and then by the Brawnes, and his doctor said he must go south for the winter. Shelley wrote asking him to Pisa, but eventually Severn, who was going to Rome, offered to take him. They sailed on Sept. 18, and on the way down Channel they landed for a while near Lulworth, where he wrote his last poem, Bright Star, would I were stedfast as thou art. From Naples they went to Rome, where on Dec. Io he had a final relapse; he was carefully tended by Severn to the last, and died On Feb. 23, 1821.
With the contents of the 182o volume everyone is familiar; here we have the true measure of his powers, and though some faults remain, the early weakness is quite left behind. In Isabella,
a story taken from Boccaccio, but, needless to say, given a wholly personal romantic colouring, there are still occasional slipshod phrases, and the old tendency to follow idly the chance suggestion of a rhyme, but with all his old colour and Music there is a new depth of passion and tragedy. The metre is the octave stanza, recently popularised by Byron. In Hyperion, a fragment of a blank verse epic, the influence of Milton is clear, and in the end he found the Miltonic note too unnatural to sustain. The theme is Greek, though the treatment is Gothic ; it tells of the sup planting of the old deities by the Olympians. St. Agnes' Eve is romantic narrative at its height ; its enchanted atmosphere and blaze of colour are such that one never pauses to ask whether the characters are anything more than a formal foreground to the setting. Of Lamia much the same can be said; the story of the serpent-lady, dissolved before her lover's eyes by the "sophist's eye, keen, cruel, perceant, stinging," comes through Burton from Philostratus. The metre is rhymed heroics, but more in Dryden's manner than Endymion, with less use of the overflow. The great Odes stand alone in literature, new in form and spirit, and owing nothing to any predecessor. They are too well known for descrip tion and too perfect for criticism. As a dramatist Keats is hard to judge ; he died too young to accomplish anything great in that sphere; Ot/io is not a success. Stephen, so far as it goes, has far more promise, being full of stir and action.
The first life of Keats was R. M. Milnes' (Lord Houghton) Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats (2 vols., 1848). The standard life is Keats by S. Colvin, in the English Men of Letters series (1887). The standard edition of the poems is by H. B. Forman; Poetical works and other Writings (4 vols., 1883) ; Poetical Works (5884) ; there have been several subsequent editions of this, the 1915 edition containing the new sonnets first printed in The Times, May 18, 1914, and discussed in the Literary Supplement, May 2 I. Both this edition and Colvin's Keats contain a full bibliography.