The ‘Eye of Appetite’

Abstract

The difference between Byron and Keats was not as great as either poet would have wished: but it was sufficiently marked for both of them to chew at it in fascination. Even if we might want to challenge the evaluative implications of Keats’s verdict here, he is, as usual, being more perceptive than he might realise. In fastening on Byron’s concern with what he sees, he does, of course, hope to diminish him; and posterity might well have been glad to accept such diminishment, as sanction for its own refusal to allow to Byron the accolade of Romantic imaginative vision. It is as though Keats were speaking for all the other major Romantic poets: behind his bold assertion (‘you see the great difference’, he goes on, apparently unaware of his appeal to the organ he denigrates) we might hear a whisper of Wordsworth’s ire at Crabbe’s mere poetry of ‘fact’.² It has become hard to think of the Romantic poets outside the pale of the imagination: Coleridge’s esemplastic power (like his opium) has indeed had its own binding effect,³ and, just as Byron is being excluded with great firmness by Keats, so he has been excluded by a poetic and critical tradition that owes more to Keats than anyone has been prepared fully to admit.

You speak of Lord Byron and me — There is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees — I describe what I imagine — Mine is the hardest task.

(Keats, September 1819¹)