hed rule
And compass vile: so that ye taught a school
Of dolts to smooth, inlay and clip and fit;
Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit,
Their verses tallied. Easy was the task:
A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask
Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race!
That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face,
And did not know it,--no, they went about,
Holding a poor decrepit standard out,
Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and, in large,
The name of one Boileau!"

This complaint, so far as it relates to the _style_ of the rule-ridden
eighteenth-century poetry, had been made before: by Cowper, by
Wordsworth, by Coleridge. But Keats, with his instinct for beauty,
pierces to the core of the matter. It was because of Pope's defective
sense of the beautiful that the doubt arose whether he was a poet at all.
It was because of its

". . . forgetting the great end
Of Poetry, that it should be a friend
To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of man,"

that the poetry of the classical school was so unsatisfying. This is one
of the very few passages of Keats that are at all doctrinal[24] or
polemic; and as such it has been repeatedly cited by biographers and
essayists and literary historians. Lowell quotes it, in his essay on
Dryden, and adds; "Keats was the first resolute and wilful heretic, the
true founder of the modern school, which admits no cis-Elizabethan
authority save Milton." Mr. Gosse quotes it and says, "in these lines he
has admirably summed up the conceptions of the first half of the present
century with regard to classical poetry." [25] The passage was still
fresh when Byron, in the letter to Disraeli already quoted[26] (March
15th, 1820), held it up to scorn as the opinion of "a young person
learning to write poetry and beginning by teaching the art. . . . The
writer of this is a tadpole of the Lakes, a young disciple of the six or
seven new schools, in which he has learned to write such lines and such
sentiments as the above. He says 'easy were the task' of imitating Pope,
or it may be of equalling him, I presume. I recommend him to try before
he is so positive on the subject, and then compare what he will have
_then_ written, and what he has now written, with the humblest and
earliest compositions of Pope, produced in years still more youthful than
those of Mr. Keats when he invented his new 'Essay on Criticism,'
entitled 'Sleep and Poetry' (an ominous title) from wh