His rank among English poets is not easy to determine. In a sense Matthew Arnold was right when he declared that Keats (is with Shakespeare.* It might be added that he is with Milton also; but he is with these supreme poets only in respect to certain qualities of genius. He is obviously not with them in sus tained power, in unexcelled majestic achieve ments, in breadth and duration of popular ap peal. Even when he is compared with his con temporaries he is found to lack, in a measure, Byron's passion and cosmopolitan influence, Wordsworth's power to calm and ennoble the spirit and quicken the vision, Coleridge's in effable secret of casting glamour, and Shelley's gift of interpenetrating poetry and life with the radiance of a pure idealism. In quantity of approximately perfect work he falls short; of course, through no fault of his own. The juvenile volume of 1817 and (Endymion,' though in a sense the latter confirms the truth of its first line that Ca thing of beauty is a joy forever,* are on the whole immature, and the posthumous 'poems and letters, though abound ing in merits, are uneven in value and below the highest excellence. It is mainly on the magnificent volume of 1820—on the impressive artistic mastery shown in
Bibliography.— Keats' poems were first collected, with those of Coleridge and Shelley, in 1829. In 1848 R. M. Milnes (Lord Hough
ton) published the (Life, Letters and Literary Remains> (revised 1867) ; biographical material then began to accumulate through such books as Leigh Hunt's (Autobiography.> In 1876 Mr. H. B. Forman edited the letters to Fanny Brawne, and in 1885 the works in prose and verse in four volumes (reissued and augmented in 1889). In 1883 J. G. Speed, of the American branch of the family, issued a volume of