eBooks Base 2000

[Footnote: _Adonais._]
The wrongs of Keats, also, are not so much stressed in genuine poetry as
formerly, and the fiction that his death was due to the hostility of his
critics is dying out, though Shelley's _Adonais_ will go far toward
giving it immortality. Oscar Wilde's characterization of Keats as "the
youngest of the martyrs" [Footnote: _At the Grave of Keats._]
brings the tradition down almost to the present in British verse, but
for the most part its popularity is now limited to American rhymes. One
is rather indignant, after reading Keats' own manly words about hostile
criticism, to find a nondescript verse-writer putting the puerile
self-characterization into his mouth:
I, the Boy-poet, whom with curse
They hounded on to death's untimely doom.
[Footnote: T. L. Harris, _Lyrics of the Golden Age_ (1856).]
In even less significant verse the most maudlin sympathy with Keats is
expressed. One is tempted to feel that Keats suffered less from his
enemies than from his admirers, of the type which Browning characterized
as "the foolish crowd of rushers-in upon genius .


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