ABSTRACT

In this chapter, the author attempts to the struggle itself—to see what John Milton learned, and what he could therefore teach subsequent poets, about the negative aspects of “learning from experience. John Keats was always dubious about Milton’s “philosophy”, his achieved knowledge, though, like all the Romantics, he shared his republican views and thought that the nobility of Milton’s phrase “for fear of change perplexes Monarchs” should have had power in itself “to pull that feeble animal Charles from his bloody throne.” Milton’s infant, like Keats’s, appears to be initially starving—“pale-eyed”, fearful that the “hideous hum” from the high-arched roof of its mother’s mouth is not music but “words deceiving” like those of the Belle Dame or like Hyperion’s “fit roofing to a nest of woe”. The “principle of beauty” is Milton’s “idea of the beautiful”. Fame is in Lycidas the “last infirmity of noble mind”—interestingly, Keats says “minds”, which makes it more intimate.