I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.

The sentiment expresses an uncompromising artistic ambition: the speaker prefers the risk of failure to the safety of modest achievement. Read in a Keatsian frame, it aligns with the Romantic ideal of striving for the highest imaginative and poetic excellence, even at personal cost. It also implies a hierarchy of values in which greatness (as measured by lasting artistic stature) outweighs comfort, approval, or incremental success. However, because this wording is not securely traceable to a specific Keats letter, poem, or recorded remark, it should be treated cautiously as a paraphrase or later attribution rather than a reliably documented statement of his.