It is almost impossible to credit the accepted story that he passed all his boyhood without making any attempt at writing poetry.  “He did not begin to write,” says Sir Sidney Colvin, “till he was near eighteen.”  If this is so, one feels all the more grateful to his old schoolfellow, Cowden Clarke, who lent him The Faery Queene, with a long list of other books, and in doing so presented him with the key that unlocked the unsuspected treasure of his genius.  There is only one person, indeed, in all the Keats circle to whom one is more passionately grateful than to Cowden Clarke:  that is Fanny Brawne.  Keats no doubt had laboured to some purpose—­occasionally, to fine purpose—­with his genius before the autumn of 1818, when he met Fanny Brawne for the first time.  None the less, had he died before that date, he would have been remembered in literature not as a marvellous original artist, but rather as one of those “inheritors of unfulfilled renown” among whom Shelley surprisingly placed him.  Fanny Brawne may (or may not) have been the bad fairy of Keats as a man.  She was unquestionably his good fairy as a poet.

This is the only matter upon which one is seriously disposed to quarrel with Sir Sidney Colvin as a biographer.  He does not emphasize as he ought the debt we are under to Fanny Brawne as the intensifier of Keats’s genius—­the “minx,” as Keats irritably called her, who transformed him in a few months from a poet of still doubtful fame into a master and an immortal.  The attachment, Sir Sidney thinks, was a misfortune for him, though he qualifies this by adding that “so probably under the circumstances must any passion for a woman have been.”  Well, let us test this “misfortune” by its consequences.  The meeting with Fanny took place, as I have said, in the autumn of 1818.  During the winter Keats continued to write Hyperion, which he seems already to have begun.  In January 1819 he wrote The Eve of St. Agnes.  During the spring of that year, he wrote the Ode to Psyche, the Ode on a Grecian Urn, the Ode to a Nightingale, and La Belle Dame sans Merci.  In the autumn he finished Lamia, and wrote the Ode to Autumn.  To the same year belongs the second greatest of his sonnets, Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art.  In other words, practically all the fine gold of Keats’s work was produced in the months in which his passion for Fanny Brawne was consuming him as with fire.  His greatest poems we clearly owe to that heightened sense of beauty which resulted from his translation into a lover.  It seems to me a treachery to Keats’s memory to belittle a woman who was at least the occasion of such a passionate expenditure of genius.  Sir Sidney Colvin does his best to be fair to Fanny, but his presentation of the story of Keats’s love for her will, I am afraid, be regarded by the long line of her disparagers as an endorsement of their blame.