notes from a commonplace book...

     'We face even more directly the problem that was widely discussed throughout the fifty years before Keats was born and so throughout his lifetime: where are the Homers and Shakespeares, the "greater genres" - the epic and dramatic tragedy - or at least reasonable equivalents? How much of this is to be explained by the modern premium on originality - by the vivid awareness of what the great art of the past has achieved, and by the poet's or artist's embarrassment before that rich amplitude? The pressure of this anxiety and the variety of reactions to it constitute one of the great unexplored factors in the history of the arts since 1750. And in no major poet, near the beginning of the modern era, is this problem met more directly than it is in Keats. The question of the way in which Keats was somehow able, after the age of twenty-two, to confront this dilemma, and to transcend it, has fascinated every major poet who has used the English language since Keats's death and also every major critic since the Victorian era,' (W. Jackson Bate, John Keats, 1963: p. viii).