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Keats and Shelley: Winds of Light
Kelvin Everest
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Keats and Shelley

Keats and Shelley

Winds of Light
KELVIN EVEREST
1
3
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In memory of
Geoffrey Matthews (1920–1984)

Acknowledgements
I owe thanks to the many friends and colleagues who have helped me to appreciate
and understand English poetry. My enthusiasm for the study of literature was first
kindled by an inspirational English teacher at East Barnet Grammar School,
Mr E. J. Ward. As a student at Reading University I benefitted enormously from
the shaping guidance of Ian Fletcher, John Goode, Donald Gordon, Lionel Kelly,
and Christopher Salvesen. Above all, my undergraduate tutor and doctoral super-
visor, Geoffrey Matthews, became my mentor, my friend, and, for me, the exemplar
of what a literary scholar and critic should be. This volume of essays is dedicated
to the memory of Geoffrey.
It has been a privilege to learn from my students in teaching the Romantic poets
in the English departments at St David’s University College Lampeter, Leicester
University, and Liverpool University. I am especially indebted to my research
students: Laura Barlow, Rachael Ben-Itzhak, John Bleasdale, Laura Blunsden,
Chulmin Chung, William Drennan, Elaine Hawkins, Lisa Leslie, Anna Mercer,
Sharon Ruston, Hamid Shojameehir, Jon Stone, Jon Thorpe, and Sally West.
A great many teachers, academic friends, colleagues, and collaborators have
helped me with their advice, knowledge, and skill, and through the stimulus of
their conversation. At the risk of inadvertent omission, I would like to thank Jane
Aaron, Carlene Adamson, Paul Baines, Bruce Barker-Benfield, John Barnard,
Simone Batin, Bernard Beatty, Shobhana Bhattacharji, Drummond Bone, Will
Bowers, Marilyn Butler, Peter Butter, Marco Canani, Deborah Cartmell, Judith
Chernaik, Gillian Clark, Duncan Cloud, Stefan Collini, Lilla Maria Crisafulli,
Richard Cronin, Nora and Keith Crook, Sandy Cunningham, Stuart Curran,
Paul Dawson, Simon Dentith, Gavin Edwards, Michael Erkelenz, Tony Fitton-
Brown, Paul Foot, Neil Fraistat, Hilary Fraser, John Freeman, Sarah Gartside, Sara
Haslam, Ian Hilson, Boyd Hilton, William Keach, Desmond King-Hele, Peter
Kitson, Greg Kucich, Edward Larrissy, Beth Lau, Angela Leighton, Philip Martin,
Jerome J. McGann, Andrew Motion, Bill Myers, Mathelinda Nabugodi, Vince
Newey, Lucy Newlyn, Lawrence Normand, Michael O’Neill, Sharon Ouditt, Tom
Paulin, Seamus Perry, Ken Phillipps, David Pirie, Adrian Poole, Cathy Rees,
Donald H. Reiman, Gareth Roberts, Charles Robinson, Nicholas Roe, Francesco
Rognoni, Michael Rossington, Rick Rylance, Malabika Sarkar, Carol Smith, Jane
Stabler, Fiona Stafford, Martin Stannard, Nicola Trott, Christopher Tuplin,
Valentina Varinelli, and Timothy Webb. I am grateful to the opportunities for
sustained research provided by the Master and Fellows of Trinity College,
Cambridge, for electing me as a Visiting Fellow Commoner, and to the
viii 
President and Fellows of St John’s College, Oxford, for electing me to a Visiting

Scholarship. Generous research grants have been awarded by the British
Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, and by the Universities of Leicester and
Liverpool. My work would have been impossible without the assistance of the
staff of many libraries, but in particular the Bodleian Library Oxford, the British
Library, Cambridge University Library, the English Faculty Libraries at
Cambridge and Oxford, the Huntington Library, the John Rylands Library
Manchester, Leicester University Library, Liverpool City Library, and Liverpool
University Library. Jacqueline Norton and her colleagues at Oxford University
Press have been unfailingly supportive and professional, and I greatly appreciated
the helpful constructive comments of the anonymous readers for the Press. I have
also, for all sorts of reasons, to thank Lucy, Michael, Sophie, Nick, Grace, James,
Ella, Arthur, Ivy, Sylvie, and Rhoda; and, most of all, Faith.
For permission to reprint published material in this book I am grateful to the
following relevant editors and publishers: Cambridge University Press for material
in Keats and History (1995) ed. Nicholas Roe; D. S. Brewer for material in Percy
Bysshe Shelley: Bicentenary Essays (English Association, 1992) ed. Kelvin Everest;
Leicester University Press for material in Shelley Revalued: Essays from the
Gregynog Conference (1983) ed. Kelvin Everest; Liverpool University Press for
material in Kelvin Everest, John Keats (Northcote House for the British Council,
2002); and Oxford University Press for material in The Oxford Handbook of Percy
Bysshe Shelley (2013) ed. Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe, with the assistance
of Madeleine O’Callaghan.
Material is also reprinted by permission from the following journals: Essays in
Criticism lvii (2007); Durham University Journal lxxxv (1993); Keats–Shelley
Review xxxiii (2019), and Analisi Linguistica e Letteraria (3/2019).
Contents
List of Abbreviations xi
1. Introduction: On Shelley and Keats 1

2. Why Read Keats? 15
3. Keats Amid the Alien Corn 25
4. Isabella in the Marketplace: Keats and Feminism 40
5. Keats’s Formal Legacy and the Victorians 58
6. Keats Meets Coleridge 72
7. Shelley’s Adonais and John Keats 91
8. Shelley and the Heart’s Echoes 111
9. Shelley and his Contemporaries 128
10. Shelley’s Doubles: An Approach to Julian and Maddalo 146
11. ‘Mechanism of a kind yet unattempted’: the Dramatic Action
of Prometheus Unbound 172
12. ‘Ozymandias’: The Text in Time 185
13. ‘Newly unfrozen senses and imagination’: Shelley’s Translation
of the Symposium and his Development as a Writer in Italy 201
Bibliography 219
Index 229
List of Abbreviations
BSM The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, gen. ed. Donald H. Reiman,

23 vols (New York: Garland, 1986–2002):
vol. i, Peter Bell the Third and The Triumph of Life: [parts of] Bod.
MS Shelley adds. c. 5 and adds. c. 4, ed. Donald H. Reiman, 1986;
vol. ii, Bodleian MS Shelley adds. d. 7, ed. Irving Massey, 1987;
vol. iii, Bodleian MS Shelley e. 4, ed. P. M. S. Dawson, 1987;
vol. iv, Bodleian MS Shelley d. 1, ed. E. B. Murray, 2 Parts, 1988;
vol. v, The Witch of Atlas Notebook: Bodleian MS Shelley adds.
e. 6, ed. Carlene A. Adamson, 1997;
vol. vi, Shelley’s Pisan Winter Notebook (1820–1821): Bodleian MS
Shelley adds. e. 8, ed. Carlene A. Adamson, 1992;
vol. vii, ‘Shelley’s Last Notebook’: Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 20,
adds. e. 15 and [part of] adds. c. 4, ed. Donald H. Reiman and
Hélène Dworzan Reiman, 1990;
vol. viii, Bodleian MS Shelley d. 3, ed. Tatsuo Tokoo, 1988;
vol. ix, The Prometheus Unbound Notebooks: Bodleian MSS
Shelley e. 1, e. 2, and e. 3, ed. Neil Fraistat, 1991;
vol. x, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Mythological Dramas:
Proserpine and Midas: Bodleian MS Shelley d. 2, ed. Charles
E. Robinson, and Relation of the Death of the Family of the
Cenci: Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 13, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 1992;
vol. xi, The Geneva Notebook of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Bodleian MS
Shelley adds. e. 16 and [part of] MS Shelley adds c. 4, ed. Michael
Erkelenz, 1992;
vol. xii, The ‘Charles the First’ Draft Notebook: Bodleian MS Shelley
adds. e. 17, ed. Nora Crook, 1991;
vol. xiii, Drafts for Laon and Cythna: Bodleian MSS Shelley adds.
e. 14 and adds. e. 19, ed. Tatsuo Tokoo, 1992;
vol. xiv, Shelley’s ‘Devils’ Notebook: Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 9,
ed. P. M. S. Dawson and Timothy Webb, 1993;
vol. xv, The Julian and Maddalo Draft Notebook: Bodleian MS
Shelley adds. e. 11, ed. Steven E. Jones, 1990;
vol. xvi, The Hellas Notebook: Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 7, ed.
Donald H. Reiman and Michael J. Neth, 1994;
xii   
vol. xvii, Drafts for Laon and Cythna, Cantos V–XII: Bodleian MS
Shelley adds. e. 10, ed. Steven E. Jones, 1994;
vol. xviii, The Homeric Hymns and Prometheus Drafts Notebook:
Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 12, ed. Nancy Moore Goslee, 1996;
vol. xix, The Faust Draft Notebook: Bodleian MS Shelley adds.
e. 18, ed. Nora Crook and Timothy Webb, 1997;
vol. xx, The Defence of Poetry Fair Copies: Bodleian MSS Shelley
adds. e. 6 and adds. d. 8, ed. Michael O’Neill, 1994;
vol. xxi, Miscellaneous Poetry, Prose and Translations from
Bodleian MS Shelley adds. c. 4, etc., ed. E. B. Murray, 1995;
vol. xxii, [Additional MSS mainly in the hand of Mary Shelley],
Part One: Bodleian MS Shelley adds. d. 6, Part Two: Bodleian MS
Shelley adds. c. 5 ed. Alan M. Weinberg, 2 Parts, 1997;
vol. xxiii, A Catalogue and Index of the Shelley Manuscripts in the
Bodleian Library and a General Index to the Facsimile Edition of
the Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, Volumes I–XXII by Tatsuo
Tokoo; with Shelleyan Writing Materials in the Bodleian Library:
A Catalogue of Formats, Papers, and Watermarks by B. C. Barker-
Benfield, 2002
Byron L&J Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols
(London: John Murray, 1973–94)
Gittings The Odes of Keats and their Earliest Known Manuscripts (London:
Heinemann, 1970)
Hazlitt Works Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. A. R. Glover and
P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–4)
Keats C The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers, and More Letters and Poems
of the Keats Circle, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2nd ed., 2 vols
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965)
Keats Critical Heritage John Keats: The Critical Heritage, ed. G. M. Matthews (London:
Routledge, 1971)
Keats L The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins,
2 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958)
Keats Poems The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (London: Heinemann,
1978)
Longman The Poems of Shelley, ed. Jack Donovan, Kelvin Everest, Geoffrey
Matthews, Michael Rossington et al., 4 vols to date (London:
Longman, 1989, 2000, 2011, 2014)
Mary Journals The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman
and Diana Scott-Kilvert, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1987)
   xiii
Mary L The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T Bennett,

3 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980–8)
MYR Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics: Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger,
7 vols (New York: Garland, 1985–8):
vol. i, Poems (1817): A Facsimile of Richard Woodhouse’s
Annotated Copy in the Huntington Library (New York: Garland,
1985);
vol. ii, Endymion: A Facsimile of the Revised Holograph
Manuscript (New York: Garland, 1985);
vol. iii, Endymion (1818): A Facsimile of Richard Woodhouse’s
Annotated Copy in the Berg Collection (New York: Garland, 1985);
vol. iv, Poems, Transcripts, Letters, &c.: Facsimiles of Richard
Woodhouse’s Scrapbook Materials in the Pierpont Morgan Library
(New York: Garland, 1985);
vol. v, Manuscript Poems in the British Library: Facsimile of the
Hyperion Holograph and George Keats’s Notebook of Holographs
and Transcripts (New York: Garland, 1988);
vol. vi, The Woodhouse Poetry Transcripts at Harvard: A Facsimile
of the W2 Notebook, with Description and Contents of the W1
Notebook (New York: Garland, 1988);
vol. vii, The Charles Brown Poetry Transcripts at Harvard:
Facsimiles Including the Fair Copy of Otho the Great (New York:
Garland, 1988)
Norton Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil
Fraistat, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 2002)
SC Shelley and his Circle: 1773–1822, gen. eds Kenneth Cameron,
Donald H. Reiman, and Doucet Devin Fischer, 10 vols to date
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961–)
Shelley L The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964)
Stillinger The Texts of Keats’s Poems (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1974)
References to Keats’s poems are to Keats Poems; references to Shelley’s poems are to
Longman, unless otherwise stated.
The splendours of the firmament of time

May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;
Like stars to their appointed height they climb
And death is a low mist which cannot blot
The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought
Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
And love and life contend in it, for what
Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there
And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.
Shelley, Adonais, stanza xliv
1
Introduction
On Shelley and Keats
The essays collected in this volume attempt to understand various aspects of the
work of Keats and Shelley in their relation to the literary, cultural, political, and
social currents of their age. Keats died in Rome from consumption in February
1821 aged 25; Shelley drowned in the Ligurian Sea in July 1822 aged 29. They have
been linked together in literary history, and in the popular imagination, in
significant part because these early deaths came to mark them out as the quint-
essential Romantic poets. They share a rich common context in the literary and
cultural life of Regency England, and each in his own distinctive way exhibits that
primary property of the poet as Shelley characterized it in the climax to his
Defence of Poetry:
It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the

present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their
words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature
with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps
the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations, for it is less their spirit than
the spirit of the age.¹
Although it was far from evident to their contemporaries, marginal as their careers
were to what at the time appeared the mainstream of English literature, both
Shelley and Keats were extraordinarily sensitive to the deep currents of the culture
and its direction. They share a defining representativeness of their cultural
moment, and a prophetic quality in their shaping of the directions which were
to be taken both in English poetry and in the social and political evolution of the
nation.
But in truth they are not, as poets, at all similar. Their shared contexts obviously
produce affinities, but they are affinities of historical situation and literary trad-
ition, rather than of poetic style or voice. The cultural assumption of their
similarity and connectedness originates not in poetic substance, but in the cir-
cumstances in which their achievement survived their early deaths and entered the
¹ Norton 535.
Keats and Shelley: Winds of Light. Kelvin Everest, Oxford University Press. © Kelvin Everest 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192849502.003.0001
2   
arena of their posthumous existence. The first major commemoration of Keats’s

death, and the first prescient recognition of his poetic genius, was Adonais,
Shelley’s elegy for Keats, written almost as soon as Shelley first learned in April
1821 that Keats had died. Adonais thereafter ensured the perennial connectedness
of the two poets. They were, however, in their actual personal relations never more
than somewhat wary acquaintances, brought together by their common friendship
with the radical poet and journalist Leigh Hunt, and beyond Hunt’s immediate
circle by their participation in a metropolitan literary network which saw them
meet from time to time at dinner tables and other gatherings. Their face-to-face
meetings in fact extended, at irregular intervals, over a period of little more than
one year; they first met at Hunt’s house in the Vale of Health on Hampstead Heath
in mid-December 1816, and saw each other for the last time probably in February
1818, just before the Shelleys left England for Italy on 12 March. Shelley seems to
have been an early and earnest admirer of Keats’s work, albeit with strong
reservations about the influence from Hunt in Keats’s earliest published work.
Keats was a good deal more reserved about Shelley, maintaining a sometimes wry
distance perhaps coloured by his sense of the difference in social class.²
Both poets died in relative obscurity; there was nothing remotely akin to the
glamorous European-wide celebrity of Lord Byron, whose own early death at 36 in
1824 was to confirm for posterity his membership of the ill-fated generation of
‘the Younger Romantics’. While all three poets were still alive, Shelley was the link
between Keats and Byron. Shelley and Byron first met in 1816 in Geneva, when
Byron had just left England following the scandal of his separation from his wife.
Byron and Keats never met, and until Shelley’s dialogue with him following
Keats’s death Byron entertained an offensively snobbish and disdainful contempt
for Keats’s work and supposed social class.³ The enormous success of Byron’s
work in his lifetime stood in painful contrast with the reputations of Shelley and
Keats. Keats was, of course, the victim of the violently hostile and politically
motivated attacks by critics in 1818, when his association with Hunt attracted
destructive notices of his first two published volumes. By the time that Lamia,
Isabella, the Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems was published in the summer of
1820, Keats was already mortally ill and in no position to take satisfaction in the
nascent signs of critical recognition evident in the reception of that volume.
Shelley’s final period in Pisa, and then at Villa Magni, was spent in constant
company with Byron, but Byron’s literary success came increasingly to seem a
depressing contrast with Shelley’s apparently complete failure to find any critical
recognition, let alone an audience.
² After receiving a copy of Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems from the Gisbornes
on their return from London (where they saw Keats and were shocked by his illness) to Italy in October
1820, Shelley’s opinion of Keats’s poetry rose steadily (Longman iv 235).
³ See Keats Critical Heritage 128–32.
 3
Byron’s dramatic death in 1824 in the cause of Greek independence was to

prove, in an important sense, the apogee of his fame. The ultimate sacrifice of his
life silenced the moralistic disapproval of his abandoned country and stimulated
an outpouring of national shocked mourning. The deaths of Keats and Shelley
caused by comparison barely a ripple of public reaction; and yet within twenty-
five years their reputations were firmly established as amongst the most admired
English poets. The circumstances in which their respective achievements were, at
first, saved from oblivion, and then rapidly promoted to canonical status, also
shaped some of the principal characteristics of their poetic legacy, not least in the
matter of the actual state in which the text of their poetry (and other written
legacy) was transmitted for subsequent generations of readers. This apparently
esoteric technical consideration has had consequences which have affected quite
profoundly the critical appreciation of both Keats and, more especially, Shelley,
right up to the present day. Some of the essays in this volume give detailed
consideration to those consequences.
The reliability of the texts of the poetry of Keats and Shelley is one area in which
we can sharply distinguish between them. For Keats, his poetry has in most
respects enjoyed a relatively straightforward textual transmission.⁴ There are
three main reasons: with a handful of major exceptions (notably The Fall of
Hyperion), Keats’s best poetry was published in his lifetime and seen through
the press by the poet (although the 1820 volume does present some local but
significant problems); Keats’s death was not sudden and not unexpected, so the
small but highly supportive community of his admirers had time to collect and
preserve for posterity as much of his literary and other writings as they could find
(most notably Richard Woodhouse, and also the group of friends who regularly
made transcripts of poems); and Keats’s habits of poetic composition appear to
have been unusually orderly, such that even manifestly early drafts are easily
legible, even where there is cancellation and overwriting in the process of drafting.
This is in the strongest possible contrast with Shelley’s approach to original
composition.
Shelley’s death was sudden and unexpected. He had been living in Italy for
more than four years, yet almost all of his published work had been printed and
distributed in England. As a consequence, some of his most important poems,
most notably Prometheus Unbound, were seen through the press by others, and
also subject to the misreadings of printers working from what must have some-
times seemed very perplexing copy.⁵ Shelley had no opportunity to correct the
proofs of any of his work published in England from 1818, so some major poetry
⁴ See Stillinger; Stephen Hebron, John Keats: A Poet and his Manuscripts (London: British Library,
2009); John Barnard, ‘Manuscripts and Publishing History’, in John Keats in Context, ed. Michael
O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); and the ‘Introduction’ to Keats Poems 1–23.
⁵ See Longman ii 456–70.
4   
was published in texts that were sufficiently corrupt directly to obscure the sense, a
situation which was to persist for more than one hundred and fifty years after his
death. A more extensive and intractable textual problem, however, was the result
of Shelley’s own habits of composition. Shelley used notebooks, of varying quality
and size, to draft poetry and also different kinds of prose, often jumbled together
with entries of every sort, from reading notes, quotation in different languages, to
various calculations, domestic and other, and frequently interrupted by sketches
of trees, boats, heads, and sundry other subjects. He used these notebooks all the
time, indoors, but also outdoors, in carriages, even on horseback. Sometimes they
are in good condition, but some have deteriorated physically to varying degrees
and have been affected by the circumstances of their provenance.⁶ Some are easily
readable, but quite often they are hard or all but impossible to decipher. Shelley
had an attractive flowing hand when copying fair for presentation, but when
composing in rough draft his handwriting varies from very untidy to extremely
challenging, even to practised eyes. His first drafts in fact convey a curiously
paradoxical impression, suggesting rapidity both of thought and of writing, but a
rapidity which is also constantly slowed, presumably at times to a virtual standstill,
by copious redrafting using cancellation, interlineation, and palimpsesting.
A significant proportion of Shelley’s major poetry as we know it today, particularly
from the last eighteen months of his life, has been editorially redacted from these
often very difficult manuscript materials.
It fell to Shelley’s widow, Mary, to commit herself to preserving as much poetry
(and, subsequently, as much prose) as she could puzzle out from the thirty or
more notebooks left in her possession. Mary was completely shattered by her
husband’s sudden death, and her terrible anguish of grief was intensified by the
fact that her relationship with her husband had been seriously clouded in the final
years, owing in the main to her sense of Shelley’s responsibility for the death of
their daughter Clara in Venice in 1818, and also to her desolation of spirit
following the death in Rome the following summer of their son William. In the
months following Shelley’s drowning she consequently felt a great weight of
responsibility to dedicate herself to the daunting task of editing the extensive
body of poems left in varying states of completion in the notebooks. Her extra-
ordinary efforts produced the Posthumous Poems, published in 1824 but quickly
withdrawn following the powerful opposition of Shelley’s father, Sir Timothy, who
threatened to withdraw financial support to Mary and her son should she persist
in promoting Shelley’s work. Posthumous Poems did, however, begin to find an
⁶ An extreme example is the notebook now catalogued in the Bodleian Library as Bod. MS Shelley
adds. e. 20 (BSM vii). It is commonly assumed to have been seriously damaged when it went down with
the Don Juan in the accident in which Shelley drowned in July 1822. It was repaired after its retrieval
from the wreck, a process which at some point must have involved complete disassembly, and
subsequent erroneous reassembly (see Longman iv 244–5).
 5
audience as the 1820s wore on, particularly as the availability of Shelley’s poems in
print increased with the circulation of several pirated editions.⁷
Sir Timothy Shelley’s prohibitions on the promotion of his son’s name meant
that there could be no biography by Mary, but she eventually circumvented this by
the series of quite extensive notes on the poems she provided in her four-volume
edition of Shelley’s collected poems published in 1839. This, combined with a
series of memoirs by people who had known Shelley personally, provided a basis
for wider public knowledge by the mid-century. The survival of Keats’s work was
much more in doubt in the years immediately following his death. His friends and
admirers could not agree on the right person to write his life, so no biography
appeared by anyone who had known Keats personally. But the extensive materials
by and relating to Keats, which had been gathered by Woodhouse and others of
the Keats circle, were eventually to provide the basis for his full emergence into
public awareness, when they were published in Richard Monckton Milnes’s Life,
Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats in 1848.
This volume not only brought Keats to the attention of a new generation of
appreciative readers, such as the Pre-Raphaelites; it also points back to one further
crucial factor in the cultural transmission of both Keats and Shelley in the 1820s.
In that decade Milnes was a member of the ‘Cambridge Apostles’, the exclusive
intellectual society centred at Trinity College, Cambridge. His contemporaries in
the Apostles included Tennyson and Arthur Hallam, and this influential group
were ardent early promoters of both Shelley and Keats. Hallam was probably the
initial driving intelligence; in 1828 he was one of a fast-growing number of tourists
who visited the Protestant cemetery in Rome where both poets are buried. He
wrote a sonnet on each grave, and brought back with him from Italy a copy of the
Pisan first edition of Adonais. This became the basis of the first English edition of
Adonais, published in 1829 by Hallam, Milnes, and some others. Hallam’s enthu-
siasm for Shelley and Keats was taken up by the Apostles, who even as early as
⁷ Shelley’s poetry became increasingly widely available in the period between his death in 1822 and
the appearance of Mary Shelley’s four-volume Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1839, through a
series of editions of varying quality and authority, some of them straightforwardly pirated, others
apparently benefitting from some degree of co-operation from Mary Shelley: Miscellaneous and
Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: W. Benbow, 1826) (a selection from this volume
was published as Miscellaneous Poems in the same year); The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley, and
Keats (Paris: A. and W. Galignani, 1829) (this edition was edited by Cyrus Redding, who was definitely
assisted by Mary Shelley; from 1831 it was frequently reissued in widely read American editions); The
Beauties of Percy Bysshe Shelley . . . (London: Stephen Hunt, 1830); The Works of Shelley. With his Life
2 vols (London: J. Ascham, 1834) (a selection from this volume was published as Posthumous Poems in
the same year); The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: C. Daly, 1836). See Charles H. Taylor Jr,
The Early Collected Editions of Shelley’s Poems: A Study in the History and Transmission of the Printed
Text (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958). The growth in public discussion of Shelley’s life and
work in the period after his death may be traced in fine detail through the bibliography in Karsten
Engelberg, The Making of the Shelley Myth (London: Mansell, 1988) 107–263. Sylva Norman, Flight of
the Skylark: The Development of Shelley’s Reputation (London: Max Reinhardt, 1954) remains an
enjoyably readable account of Shelley’s cultural afterlife through the nineteenth century.
6   
1829 were debating in public the superior merits of Shelley over Byron. It was
presumably the link from Shelley to Keats made for the Apostles by Adonais that
brought the more obscure Keats to prominence in this group.⁸
The pairing of Shelley and Keats was thus inseparable from the circumstances
in which their posthumous fame emerged. However, this pairing not only exag-
gerates the closeness of their relationship but also obscures how marked are the
differences between the two as poets. Keats was apparently quite unconcerned by
any notion of primacy for his own manuscripts, routinely regarding transcripts by
friends as ‘the principal authorial MS versions’. Indeed Keats’s editor, Jack
Stillinger, notes ‘the extraordinary degree to which, even in prepublication stages,
he entrusted the preservation and refining of his texts to others’.⁹ Keats’s poetic
drafts have survived in a relatively limited number precisely because of this
unconcern about the authority of his own manuscripts. Those rougher drafts
which do survive are, comparatively speaking, remarkably clean and organized.
He seems to have been able to conceive of passages of verse, or discrete stanzas, in
their entirety before writing them out. Where we are still able to observe him at
work in revision, there is a strong impression of the forward drive of his compos-
ing energy, as if the conception is mentally in place before its worked-out
expression; and there is also a distinctive feeling of confident progress towards a
perfected form. It is this sense of inevitable development towards the right form
which left him apparently so relaxed about future stages of refinement. As an
example we can take perhaps the best known of Keats’s surviving rough drafts, the
early holograph of The Eve of St Agnes now in the Houghton Library at Harvard.
A particularly interesting portion of that rough draft covers the lines which were
eventually published in 1820 as stanzas xxiv, xxv, and xxvi. This was a tricky
passage for Keats to get right, because it represents the moment when the
concealed Porphyro watches from a hiding place as Madeline enters her Gothic
chamber, tense with excitement at the prospect of a vision of her future husband,
and then undresses as Porphyro looks on. If the assumption that this was the
original draft of the poem is correct, then we note that stanza xxiv was first
written:
A Casement tripple arch’d and diamonded

With many coloured glass fronted the Moon
In midst wereof a shilded scutcheon shed
⁸ On Hallam’s visit to the Protestant cemetery in Rome and its impact on him, see Martin
Blocksidge, ‘A Life Lived Quickly’: Tennyson’s Friend Arthur Hallam and his Legend (Brighton:
Sussex Academic Press, 2011) 66. For Cambridge enthusiasm for Shelley and Keats, and debates on
‘Shelley v Byron’, see T. Wemyss Reid, The Life, Letters, and Friendships of Richard Monckton Milnes,
2 vols (New York: Cassell, 1891) i 66–77; Nicholas Stanley-Price, ‘Shelley’s Grave Revisited’, K-SJ lxv
(2016) 51–68, is a detailed account of the rapidly growing scale of tourist visitors to Shelley’s grave.
⁹ Keats Poems 11.
 7
High blushing gules; she kneeled saintly down

And inly prayed for grace and heavenly boon;
The blood red gules fell on her silver cross
And whitest hands devout.¹⁰
This initial draft of the stanza Keats has written out neatly and legibly, apart from
a couple of cancelled false starts. In this respect it is entirely of a piece with most of
the entire rough draft, which is to say, not in fact very ‘rough’ at all. This first
attempt at stanza xxiv Keats then cancelled in its entirety with five firm
downward-sloping lines, and started again with another opening three lines:
There was A Casement tipple archd and high

All garlanded with carven imageries
Of fruits & flowers and sunny corn ears parchd.
This too Keats has then cancelled, with four downward strokes, and has proceeded
immediately to write out a further attempt, more or less exactly as the stanza
would appear in print the following year:
A casement high and triple-arch’d there was

All garlanded with carven imag’ries
Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,
And diamonded with panes of quaint device,
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,
As are the tiger-moth’s deep-damask’d wings;
And in the midst, ’mong thousand heraldries,
And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,
A shielded scutcheon blush’d with blood of queens and kings.
This new stanza evidently incorporates many details of diction and phrasing from
the previous two attempts, as if Keats’s rapidly accumulating sense of the relevant
components has crystallized through three relatively sustained bursts of compos-
ition, the first and second not heavily revised, but each grasped as an overall
conception, then superseded by a fresh and now complete articulation. One thinks
perhaps of the analogy with an unfinished marble sculpture which the sculptor
seems merely to be freeing to emerge from the block of stone within which it had
been hidden. The development of The Eve of St Agnes is a striking embodiment of
¹⁰ Quotations from the rough draft are slightly tidied from the transcription in Keats Poems 308.
Excellent high-quality digitizations of the Keats manuscripts in the Houghton Library at Harvard,
including the rough draft of The Eve of St Agnes, are available at http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/
houghton/collections/modern/keats.cfm.
8   
the manner in which Keats’s poems move steadily towards their final form. It is as
if in Keats’s mind they are predestined to be nurturingly attended, through
repeated interventions by a revising Keats, by the corrections and refinements of
transcribers and publishers, and indeed printers, to the consummation of their
public printed incarnation.
The sculptural quality is something we recognize in Keats’s most important
poetry, not least, for example, in the opening lines of Hyperion, but most of all in
the atmosphere of the great odes. Their overall tone is of a kind of rapt composure,
articulated through verb tenses which set the utterance in a timeless present, or in
no temporal orientation at all, as in ‘To Autumn’. The effect is compounded by the
odes’ enigmatic power to suggest stillness in the representation of process,
whether almost explicitly in the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and ‘To Autumn’, or
implicitly in all the odes by the subtle self-consciousness of artefacts which
have a temporal forward pull in virtue of their grammatical structure, but at the
same time a still fixity in their verbal identity and literary form. They embody
the fundamental Keatsian paradox of human life as a transient experience of
eternal things.
These are not Shelleyan qualities. His approach to poetic composition was, to
judge from the evidence of his notebooks, to make shaping formal choices before
embarking on a rapid creativity which constantly checks and reshapes itself. These
choices frequently impose an extremely challenging discipline, as if the profusion
of verbal invention, and the range and vitality of intellect in play, required the
control not simply of sophisticated generic models but also of complex patterns of
rhyme and metre, which were sometimes used in relationship with the material
conditions of composition (such as the dimensions of the notebook being used).¹¹
An extreme instance is offered by The Triumph of Life, which remains for many
critics his greatest achievement. The enduring stature of the poem is the more
remarkable when one considers the character of the sole surviving source for all of
its published textual forms. Shelley was writing the poem in the weeks before his
death, and the poem’s unresolved ending has often prompted speculation as to
what extent we are to think of it as finished. But this question is usually posed in
relation to the actual closing lines of the poem as we have it:
¹¹ Occasionally in the notebooks Shelley reminds himself of the syllable-count of lines in a lyric as he
is composing it, by using a sequence of short vertical marks; see, e.g., the Bodleian notebook MS. Shelley
adds. e. 18, page 156 reverso (see BSM xix 294–5, and endnote p. 331). The Triumph of Life manuscript
offers a number of instances where Shelley has apparently first written out rhyme words or end-phrases
for terza rima, and then attempted to develop tercets to fit; see Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. c. 4, f. 26r,
f. 28r, f. 32v, f. 47v, and f. 51r (BSM i 165, 173, 191, 249, and 263). Amongst the manuscript drafts for
Adonais Shelley seems to have worked on one or two stanzas at a time, allowing all or most of a page to
sketch out the shape and ideas for each stanza or pair of stanzas—one senses the literal space to be
taken up by the Spenserian stanza as an outline-shaping principle—and then worked through numer-
ous cancellations and interlinear adjustments towards an overall conception for the stanzas (see
Longman iv 245).
 9
“Then, what is Life?” I said . . . the cripple cast

His eye upon the car which now had rolled
Onward, as if that look must be the last,
And answered . . . “Happy those for whom the fold
Of
These lines could be taken to represent something close to a conclusion as Shelley

intended, but their evident incompleteness lends itself also to many possible
scenarios of continuation, with their associated possibilities of pessimism or
optimism in the working out of what might have been planned as a longer, or
much longer, work. The real incompleteness of The Triumph of Life, however,
consists not in its ending but in the utterly chaotic state of the sole, extremely
rough, draft. This draft consists almost exclusively of a quite large pile of loose
sheets, each of which has been folded in half to make a little booklet of four pages,
which Shelley used with the folded edge to his left.¹² The most cursory inspection
of the draft immediately dramatizes how the poem, as it has entered the critical
tradition, is an editorial redaction from hundreds of hastily and often illegibly
written lines which are obscured by countless cancellations, insertions, overwrit-
ing, interlineations, and unresolved alternative words and phrasings. As with most
of Shelley’s poems which have been retrieved posthumously from the notebooks,
the task of redaction would be literally impossible but for two things: the poem is
in iambic pentameters, and in terza rima, so these formal requirements are
available for the editor as a certain guide to intention; and Shelley as a poet
disciplined himself to an absolutely unfailing observance of metrical correctness.
This allows the editor to rely on the basic tenet that Shelley’s habit of constant self-
revision in the act of composition never fails to have an ear to a line which works
metrically, as well as in terms of the sense (however demanding that sense can be).
This is what enabled the first and bravest of the poem’s editors, Mary Shelley, to
produce a great poem out of the chaos of the manuscript. It is also what has
supported subsequent editors through their labours on most of Shelley’s poems
whose sole source is a holograph manuscript. By ‘metrical correctness’ I of course
do not mean a mechanical adherence to some technical requirement of counted
beats and syllables. Shelley is the very last poet one might think of in such terms:
his variations within an imposed pattern are defining of his style, whether we
think of substituted metrical feet, ‘feminine’ line-endings, placement of caesurae,
run-on lines, or subtle changes in the weight of terminal pause. But we can usually
see a way through his heavy revisions to the final form of line by listening to the
play of rhythm against formal pattern.
¹² The manuscript is in a box containing various non-notebook items now catalogued in the
Bodleian as MS. Shelley adds. c. 4 (BSM i).
10   
The contrast between Keats and Shelley is then between two compositional
styles. Keats seems to have composed fluently and quickly, while Shelley worked
with a kind of self-retarding discipline to shape his conceptions through arduous
labour. But when it comes to the finished products of these compositional styles,
the contrast works quite oppositely. The achieved Keatsian effect is one of
sculptural poise:
Thou still unravished bride of quietness,

Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
This stanza perfectly embodies the paradox of human life rendered in stillness by
art, and thereby at once perfected and falsified. The movement of the verse has a
meditated self-possession, resting on the variously weighted line-endings, the
steady deliberative iambic pulse; the verse proceeds at its own completely confi-
dent slowed pace, the very sound of calm reflection. The opening metaphors work
together with these effects. The urn is figured as a virgin bride—‘unravished’
because still, after its millennia of existence, unbroken, intact—and ‘still’ works
ambivalently to enter an implicit question about the rightness of such a condition.
‘Still’ gives us the cost of the urn’s survival: it is unbroken because nothing has ever
happened to it, it has never moved; and it is still, as it were ‘even after all this time’,
‘unravished’. The urn is in an unconsummated marriage with ‘quietness’, surely
not to be considered an enlivening life partner. And it has been brought up a
‘foster-child’, by ‘silence and slow time’, the two circumstances which have
preserved it both intact and remote from lived experience. Who, though, are we
to think of as the urn’s true parents? It came into being as a result of the fruitful
union of its maker, the artist, with the material from which it was made. That
material is on one level a matter of shaped clay and decorative pigment, but as a
representative of all forms of art it is made not of material in that direct sense but
out of the human experience the artist shapes into art. And it is a ‘foster-child’
because it was separated at birth from that living context and has survived as an
ironically self-negating representation of human life, a life which depends on the
impermanence and flux of existence for its meaning. To perfect real people is in
Keats’s perspective to make them into gods, but the immortality of deified beings
 11
loses the very essence of real existence, which can only be experienced in a living
moment which is always moving from approach to departure.
Keats’s art is a kind of lamenting celebration of its difference from life. It is
completely unlike Shelley’s rapidity of forward rush in the verse, which goes with a
headlong quality of thought and grammatical expression. Shelley rarely pauses for
long on the pleasures and realities of the lived moment. His art embodies change,
evolution, and the manner in which ‘the one Spirit’s plastic stress / Sweeps
through the dull dense world, compelling there, / All new successions to the
forms they wear’ (Adonais ll. 381–3); and the movement of his most characteristic
verse is fast-moving, energized by an unmistakable driven restlessness:
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving every where;
Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!
The energetic speed of the verse never flags from its fluidly alliterated opening
phrase, sustained right through the one-sentence stanza by a virtuosic technique:
the first tercet’s present-participle rhyme-words, the very early caesural pauses in
the second and third lines, which permit a long unresting flow in the remainder of
each line, accentuated by the fast run-on from the second to the third line. Shelley
is particularly inventive in the way the pauses within lines accentuate the speed
of movement by a feeling of its straining against resistance, as in the iteration of
successive pauses in ‘Yellow, and black, and pale’, succeeded by the quick patter
of ‘Pestilence-stricken multitudes’, and then the late placement of the caesurae in
that line. Like Keats, Shelley has developed a stanza-form from sonnet models, but
the effect could not be more different. The combination of Shakespearian quatrain
with Petrarchan sestet in the ten-line ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ stanza has a balance
and assured poise which makes for Keats’s highly characteristic tableau-like effect.
Shelley adapts terza rima tercets to a fourteen-line ‘sonnet’ which seems to need
the terminal Shakespearian couplet to be brought to a halt. The rhymes constantly
12   
pick up momentum from their interlaced character, driven by insistent run-on

lines—notably not just within but between tercets—until one feels the pace almost
needs to interrupt itself by the parenthetic eleventh line, breathlessly squeezing a
difficult compacted metaphor into an already crowded mental landscape (a line
initiated by the trochaic Driving, a metrical substitution which itself drives the line
more urgently).
It could be argued that the shorter lyric poems do not represent Shelley at his
most distinctive; and this makes him a more challenging read for the contempor-
ary audience. In terms of formal and generic experimentation he is much broader
in range than Keats, and his poetry is far denser in literary, philosophical, and
scientific reference. Keats was a profoundly intelligent man, with a sound educa-
tion and, given his late start and short life, a wide and catholic knowledge of
English poetry and drama. His short intense period of development used succes-
sive poetic models as a kind of springboard for his own artistic growth, so that his
allusiveness is more a matter of stylistic affinity than a comprehensive situating of
his voice in a tradition. Shelley offers a very different intelligence, practised and
adventurous in exploring ideas (including a strong appetite for heavyweight
philosophical works), and with a deep knowledge of the classics. Keats read
Latin, and French, but Shelley was an exceptionally gifted linguist, with fluency
or competence in at least seven languages. His translations from the Greek,
Spanish, and German are amongst the most brilliant in the language.¹³
Shelley is, in the end, also much the more difficult poet. The speed of his verse is
a characteristic that is present not just in the shorter lyrics, the poems on which his
Victorian popularity was based and which have been so frequently anthologized.
It is also a feature of his longer poems, particularly the major works of the years in
Italy, Prometheus Unbound, The Witch of Atlas, Epipsychidion, and The Triumph
of Life. The longer poems taken as a whole encompass an extraordinary variety of
genre, form, and tone. They range from the relaxed conversational idiom of Letter
to Maria Gisborne, the sharply witty satire of Peter Bell the Third, the impassioned
demotic-visionary writing of The Mask of Anarchy, to sophisticated reflection in
Julian and Maddalo, and the dark dramatic conception of The Cenci. In truth
none of these long works makes for particularly easy reading. They are in their
various ways seriously demanding poems which require both a sustained intel-
lectual attentiveness and an appreciative awareness of that combination of long,
syntactically involved sentences run across complex poetic forms, symbolic
expression, and a figurative imagination which looks to knit together the surface
¹³ Shelley’s translations from Calderón’s El mágico prodigioso and Goethe’s Faust (neither currently
available in accurate texts), fragmentary as they are, are among the best in English; and in English verse
translations from classical Greek Shelley has no equal: see especially Euripides’ The Cyclops (Longman ii
371–412), and the Homeric Hymn to Mercury (Longman iii 508–43).
 13
details of the world in an endlessly extendable network of perceived relations

and similarities.
Surveying Shelley’s ten-year writing career as a whole, it is a restlessly innova-
tive and questing development, continually adapting models and genres in unex-
pected ways, and likewise insistently creative in elaborating fresh combinations of
metre and rhyme. It is possible that, when he died not yet 30 years old, he had, for
all the immense richness and range of his achievement, still not truly found his
most appropriate voice as a poet. Keats’s extremely brief career, essentially just
three short years, seems in contrast to display a kind of inevitability in its
development. From the outset there is a range of poems which are concerned
with their own promise, with the poet’s questing for self-assurance that his
conviction of a high poetic calling is justified and realistic; and this questing
goes along with a trying out of poetic modes borrowed from admired models
among the greatest English poets of the past. From this ferment of self-
interrogation, the major body of work emerges with simple elegance into three
groups: the Odes, the narrative poems (Isabella: or, the Pot of Basil, The Eve of
St Agnes, Lamia), and the two Hyperion poems. Hyperion and The Fall of
Hyperion are, undoubtedly, difficult poems, relatively obscure and unfinished in
both cases, one senses, because Keats finds it hard to bring their narrative
situations to bear accessibly on his underlying thematic preoccupations. The
two groups of the Odes, and the narrative poems, on the other hand, constitute
a body of work which seems perfectly achieved, balancing an implicit mental
toughness and challenge, with a sensuous relish for the materiality of verse which
has been shaped to its exactly satisfying best form.
There is, however, another dimension altogether in which the pairing of Shelley
and Keats does remain entirely appropriate. They are, to return to the closing
passage from Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, poets whose best poems interrogate the
spirit of their age. Both are deeply concerned to represent the relationship between
their limited, class-bound, and all too frailly mortal persons, with currents of
feeling and meaning which are transhistorical and extra-human. This concern
takes a different form with each poet. For Keats, his endeavour is to catch and fix
moments where there is an intersection of the transiently personal with the
permanent, the immortal. It is an achieved intention which means that his greatest
poetry is inextricably bound up with the human, the social, and the historical, as it
strives to represent imagined forms of release from such constraints, into envi-
sioned realms where we are not ‘made for death’. Shelley too represents a tension
between present reality and orders of change which are vast in scale and duration.
For Shelley, though, the attempt to represent an order of being beyond the
material present drives his imagination through constantly deferred figurations.
His ambition is to articulate a vision of the perfected forms of things, whether that
be by his repeated efforts to find an ideal female figure through the medium of his
successive conflicted relations with real women, or by his striving to see beyond
14   
the past and present oppressed condition of humanity to a perfected society of the
future. The political commitment, which is so powerfully consistent throughout
his career, brought with it a fundamental irony about his own class position: a
man of his social background, with a hereditary title, a family estate, and the
associated levels of education, income, and general sense of the possibilities of life,
was very much in the path of the revolutionary change which he anticipated and
believed inevitable. So there is a kind of suicidal logic in Shelley’s embrace of the
radical cause. He quite consciously often thought of his actual life as a temporary
and drastically limited condition. His true destiny was to be the trumpet of a
prophecy, through his writings, to future generations. In the most general terms,
the ambition of the writing remains remarkably consistent, right through from
Queen Mab until the final period: ‘human society is always seen in a cosmic
setting, and human history as inseparable from the history of stars and insects’.¹⁴
The shifting frames of reference of the successive essays in the present volume
reflect developing engagements with changing critical, political, and theoretical
perspectives. They embody a multistranded approach to reading poetry. The
context always matters, whether that be construed as biographical, material, or
sociopolitical. The ideas and values in play always matter. Textual scholarship is
fundamental for literary criticism, because critical reading is reliant on accurate
texts. But, most fundamentally, close critical reading remains at the heart of
meaningful commentary, because it is only through close critical reading that
we can ground and share what makes a poem important and lastingly valuable.
These essays do not comprise a single unifying argument, and the specific works of
literature under consideration are not proposed in the context, or the service, of
such an argument. They are proposed because they are important works of art, a
quality which precedes and justifies the other kinds of intellectual work which
their exposition requires.
¹⁴ Geoffrey Matthews, quoted in Longman i 268.

2
Why Read Keats?
A powerful modern image of Keats represents him as the very incarnation of the
conventionally ‘poetic’. His poetry is often taken to embody a desire to escape
from the harsh and unforgiving real world into an imaginary realm of unchanging
perfection and ceaseless pleasure. This is a common view amongst readers new to
Keats, and indeed new to poetry, and it is deeply engrained in contemporary
popular culture. It derives, ultimately, from a more meditated and informed
school of thought, including many academic readers, which sees Keats as a central
representative of the Romantic movement, and which thinks of that movement as
an abdication of moral and intellectual responsibility. The argument is that the
English Romantic movement in poetry of the early nineteenth century was a
reaction against the changes wrought to the forms of personal and social life, and
to the environment, by industrialization and its accompanying economic and
political upheavals. The Romantic seeks refuge from these pressing realities, in the
self, in nature, the imagination, the past; anything is preferable to direct engage-
ment with the real circumstances and issues of contemporary life, riven as that life
was by deep domestic social conflict, and by international war. Keats, above all the
major English Romantics, can seem to lend himself to this kind of reading, for it
cannot be denied that the bulk of his poetry offers no obvious direct reflection of,
or commentary upon, the crises of his times.
In fact Keats can appear at first sight to offer no commentary on anything at all.
One of the biggest difficulties for new readers of Keats is to come to an under-
standing of what his poetry is actually about. Its declared themes—beauty, love,
erotic experience, the fleetingness of experience, and the power of art to take
experience out of time—are not usually presented in a context of sustained
argument, nor are they presented in relationship with Keats’s own ordinary social
experience. His handling of such themes is, on the contrary, strikingly abstract,
which compounds the effect of their inherent abstraction, and this can make his
poetry seem preoccupied principally with the desire to embody the ideal, to
become the ideal, and thus to make the poetry itself the very form of escape for
which the poet seems to yearn.
This image of Keats, as a writer whose work is concerned with poetry as a form
of escape from reality, is certainly a misreading, but it is a misreading that does
nevertheless respond to qualities that are present in his work. Recent readings of
Keats in his historical context, which seek in various ways to read his poetry as a
form of political or historical engagement, have been numerous and influential,
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192849502.003.0002
16   
and most critics would now agree that Keats knew all about his contemporary
world, and that his poetry is a form of representation of that world. The obliquely
indirect and relatively abstracted nature of this representation still, however, poses
a real critical problem. It is, of course, important to develop a way of reading Keats
which gives proper countenance to his rootedness in time and history. But Keats’s
qualities as a poet can be obscured and distorted by a determinedly historical
reading, quite as much as by an exclusive emphasis on his abstractness and the
intensity of his engagement with imaginative experience. Keats was interested in
time, history, reality; it is where he lived. But it is also clear that he was interested
in other kinds of existence, and that his poetry is deeply engaged with the problem
of what it might mean to live out of time.
Keats can be thought of as an escapist, a poet of pure imagination. He can quite
oppositely be thought of as a poet very much of his own times, producing a poetry
whose contemporary reference has been long obscured. Both interpretations
naturally owe a great deal to the history of his posthumous reputation, in which
Keats has come to play an important role in cultural debate about the place of
poetry in the modern world. As with other great poets, the nature of his artistic
achievement finds redefinition with the changing emphases of the critical com-
munity. In the Victorian period, when there was a pressure to think of idealism as
unlikely to flourish in the real world, Keats’s poetry, like that of his contemporary
and acquaintance Percy Bysshe Shelley, was considered to be wholly committed to
the life of the imagination, as distinct from the reason and from social responsi-
bilities. In recent times, when academic criticism in Western Europe and the
United States has come to lay great stress on the inescapable influence of historical
and social contexts, Keats has been newly read as a poet of political commitment,
in the liberal cause, whose straightforward or oblique social and political reference
has been seriously misrecognized by preceding generations of readers. In short,
interpretations of Keats himself, and of his work, have since his death served
strikingly to embody larger patterns of emphasis and outlook in the literary-
critical community. He now as a consequence has a cultural meaning that has
become closely bound up with judgements of his actual poetry. It is for this reason
impossible to think about Keats’s achievement without consideration of his life
story, and its many retellings. His life has effectively become one of his most
important works of art. His case can serve as the prime instance of the artist who
embraces his art as a self-sufficient and autonomous realm; or, conversely, it can
be used to prove the impossibility of escape from determining historical condi-
tions. Keats’s meaning for his readers has altered with the altering larger debates
around these questions.
Keats’s achievement as a poet has, however, a further special resonance and
meaning for modern readers. His example affirms that English poetry is an art
form for the people as a whole, and not the preserve of a privileged elite. In Keats’s
poetry the English poetic tradition is claimed for a fundamentally democratic
   ? 17
future, in which high aesthetic experience is the possession of a wider and socially
inclusive readership. And this claim is made, pre-eminently, by Keats as a
practitioner; he recognized the power and vitality of poetry, but also, with
determined and courageous self-belief, he recognized his own right to take a
place amongst the English poets.
Keats’s right to be a poet was hardly obvious to his contemporaries, and indeed,
notoriously, it was publicly contested in the most savage fashion by reviewers of
his published work. He was not privileged in his birth and upbringing. He did not
have a classical education. His writings and biography suggest that he was not a
practising Christian, and indeed the values he lived by cannot be referred to any of
the great belief systems. When he approaches subjects that are associated with
traditions of formal thinking, he tends to represent himself, self-consciously, as
inexperienced and untutored. It has often been said that he came to the English
poetic tradition, as he came to English society, as something of an outsider, and
that he experienced both in the role of a looker-on, excluded by his circumstances
from active and direct participation. It is not always very clear from Keats’s own
attitudes, as recorded in his letters, and in the many recollections and accounts of
him that have survived, whether or not he himself shared this feeling of being
excluded. Critics have often pointed to the way that his poetry articulates a sense
of straining for possession of some idealized object or condition that stays out of
reach, or that can be grasped only fleetingly. But this is hardly unique to Keats, and
his articulations of such striving need always to be weighed and judged in the full
complexity of their poetic context. Nevertheless, to some of his contemporaries,
such as Lord Byron, Keats did seem in his poetic ambitions to be trying for entry
into a cultural domain that was not properly his. This aspect of the cultural
reception of Keats seems to have a particular connection with the question of
gender; the constraints of his social status, with the limits it placed on what he
could realistically hope to do and be in the real world of Regency London, mirror
in some respects the limits experienced by women at that time. This has a
particularly interesting inflection in contemporary attitudes to the sometimes
frank eroticism of Keats’s poetry, which seems to have provoked what one critic
has aptly termed a ‘socio-sexual revulsion’ in some of his male readers who
considered themselves Keats’s social superiors.¹ It is as if the offence of a socially
upstart pretension to poetic ambition was made doubly worse when it presumed
to take sex as a subject.
This is a complicated area, and it is made more so by the awkward matter of
Keats’s own attitudes to women. He seems to have been more than unusually
uncertain about his feelings towards women, whether as the objects of sexual
desire or as people. As he himself put it in a letter, ‘I have not a right feeling
¹ Keats Critical Heritage, Introduction 35.

18   
towards women’.² His awkwardness and embarrassment clearly owed a lot to his
height; he was barely 5 feet tall, and he refers often, directly or indirectly, to
his lack of physical stature, and to the self-consciousness this brought to his
manner with women. But there is also a difficulty in reconciling his idealized
image of women—idealized both as a ‘pure Goddess’ and as the object of sexual
desire and fantasy—with the reality of his actual relationships and contacts. It is in
this context very striking that Keats consistently thinks of idealized objects of all
kinds in his poetry in the feminine, as, for example, in the famous opening line of
the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. The different but related gender issues which are
raised in Keats’s work make for a very interesting intersection with present-day
interest in the significance of gender, both in the formation of human cultural
identities and their representation in art, and in the strong commitment in our
own critical culture to explore gendered ways of writing and reading.
These various ways of viewing Keats, with their implication that he was unfitted
for poetry, or that his poetry is somehow flawed by the consequences of who he
was, and when and where he lived, are, of course, in significant ways a part of his
myth. But these images of Keats also now form part of his modern importance, for
they serve to identify his career with the aspirations of today’s real readership for
poetry, which is diverse in social and cultural background, and which finds itself
coming to poetry, often, with the sense of being unequipped for enjoyment of
serious poetry by a remoteness or exclusion from the cultural context in which it
was written, and to which it can seem to speak. It is not simply that Keats’s lack of
a conventional classical education aligns him with the great majority of today’s
readers, although that is a profoundly important and far-reaching circumstance.
But, more fundamentally, his struggle to make the received poetic tradition his
own living possession offers a model for fresh generations of readers, even in their
struggle to read Keats himself. There is also a repeating pattern in Keats’s poetic
development, in which his own resources and capacities are stimulated and
released by an internalizing of the resources of the tradition, its forms, styles,
conventions, its language, in a process of assimilative imitation. Keats grows into a
distinctive poetic identity of his own by successively inhabiting the languages and
styles of his poetic exemplars. His entire career may be characterized as a series of
attempts to find a voice of his own by learning to speak the language of his most
powerful poetic models; and in each case, perhaps with the exception of the great
Spring Odes of 1819, the attempt ends just as Keats’s own voice emerges, hesi-
tantly and distinctively, to find itself speaking in a newly grown register, conscious
above all of its own fresh emergence. It is a poetry which embodies the experience
of growing into participation in a tradition, and its achievement becomes a form
² Keats L i 341.
   ? 19
of fresh life for that tradition. It is the supreme model of the means by which
poetry itself survives.
Keats’s first important poem, the sonnet ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s
Homer’, written in October 1816 when he was still only 20, embodies these issues
as its subject matter, with a startling prescience:
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
This is a poem about poetry, and about reading poetry. The young Keats, who
could not read Greek, celebrates his discovery of Homer in a sonnet which
simultaneously celebrates its own poetic promise and precocity. The sense of
wondering realization is focused primarily on a sudden grasping of literary relations
in the West European tradition. As Keats reads Chapman’s Elizabethan translation,
the Homeric epic that he has known through allusion and influence takes on
an affective reality as a reading experience, like a planet whose gravitational
influence has been remarked before its existence is confirmed by direct
observation.
This feeling of vast interlocking orbital systems, in which poets move as spheres
of influence, underlies the sonnet’s great brilliance of metaphorical play and
development. The poem begins with the image of reading as a process of geo-
graphical discovery, implicitly based to the west of the region ‘ruled’ by Homer;
that is to say, the poet’s direct literary experience has been of Britain and perhaps
of those regions immediately to the east (Keats knew French from his schooldays),
and the literary discovery he now announces has taken him much further east-
wards towards Greece, into regions known hitherto only by repute. The literary
tenor of this metaphor is always in view: in the obvious references of the fourth
line (Apollo was, of course, the Greek god of poetry), and less directly in the
suggestivity of ‘realms of gold’ in line 1, which at once evokes a generalized
imaginative world and hints at the gilded pages of old books. The journey is
20   
conceived in spatial terms, with the European literary tradition thought of as

existing as in a map of areas with fixed relations and centres of achievement,
which Keats has visited in his reading. The metaphor suggests the manner of
popular travel narratives (which Keats, like his contemporaries, read as we
consume, say, crime fiction today). This suggestion of a travel narrative is height-
ened by the suggestion in the diction of a journey not just outwards but back in
time, as if the places visited are not only far away but long ago; at first just rather
long ago, as in the old-fashioned ‘goodly’ of line 2, but then receding to an almost
fabulous feudal past, in ‘fealty’ and ‘demesne’, to give the Homeric achievement a
kind of immemorial authority and culturally remote grandeur.
The poem’s opening metaphor thus progresses towards a culminating image of
Chapman’s Homeric translation as the different atmosphere of a new place,
perhaps long anticipated but still strikingly foreign in the actual breathing in:
‘Yet did I never breathe its [i.e. the “wide expanse” ruled by Homer] pure serene /
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold’. These lines also constitute a kind
of culminating initial resting place for the reader, in a different sense, as they can
sound awkward, and technically unpractised. The poem’s first eight lines have
what might be considered a somewhat forced overliterary and factitious quality
(Keats, we know, had not read all that impressively much more than the next man,
and he had experienced actual travel hardly at all), and there is also an uncom-
fortable suspicion that the word order gets pulled out of shape by the formal
demands of the sonnet, and that the rhyme-words seem disconcerting, with a
tendency to change the direction of the unfolding sense. The ‘loud and bold’ way
that Chapman speaks out particularly embodies these limiting features. These
aspects introduce us to some large questions about Keats’s methods, attractions,
and limits as a poet.
The sonnet moves to a different register in line 9, observing as it does with deft
understatement the conventionally proper ‘turn’ in mood and argument of a
Petrarchan sonnet. The Petrarchan form is generally considered something of
a challenge in English because its rhyme scheme, which is repeated in the first and
second quatrains (i.e. lines 1–4 and 5–8), is harder to meet in English than it is in
Italian (because of the differing grammars), and harder to meet in this sonnet
form than in the Shakespearian form, which uses three differently rhyming
quatrains. The relative assurance with which Keats meets these formal demands
is extraordinary, but not more so than the thickening density of implication and
imaginative connectedness which now breeds in his development of the opening
metaphor. For the geographical metaphor is, so to speak, projected from a
regional to a global scale. The first direct experience of a literary masterpiece, an
experience hitherto only guessed at on the basis of its presence in known texts, is
not now likened simply to the arrival in a new place but to the discovery of a
new world in the literal sense. The reference of the metaphor is astronomical,
and the idea of gravitational influence, and of the literary tradition suddenly
   ? 21
comprehended as a system, now charges the feeling of wonder in discovery with

a deeper excitement, as of a daring hypothesis spectacularly confirmed. The
sense of a startling and momentous coming into focus of grand truths is exactly
given in the verb swims, which combines the effect of a compressed development
to precise focalization with the dizzying and floorless feel of a transformative
revelation.
This shift in the register of the metaphor gives Keats’s sonnet a further
dimension of affective power, and under its impetus the final four lines open
into a further resonating development. The image is of the conquistador Cortez,
confronted with a vision of the Pacific after crossing the narrow Isthmus of
Darien, from its eastern to its western seaboard. His ‘eagle eyes’ stare, while his
men are overtaken by a sudden shared ‘wild surmise’. This wild surmise has,
understandably, found many interpretations. But one that fits well with the
sonnet’s sequence of thought is that this is the moment when the explorers realize
that the hypothesis which has prompted their journey in the first place—that the
earth is a globe, and that therefore a journey westwards from Western Europe will
arrive at the ‘East’ Indies—is about after all to be confirmed. ‘After all’, because
landfall on the previously unknown American continent will at first have appeared
as a disappointment; but the revelation of a further, vast ocean opens the possi-
bility that, once traversed, the ‘East’ Indies will indeed be reached, and the earth
will be confirmed as a globe. The moment thus implicitly echoes the previous
image, because this too is the moment of discovery of a new planet, of the earth as
a planet. The logic of the poem’s development circles round in its conclusion to
encompass the full latent implication of an ambition to extend the map of one’s
literary experience. A map of that sort has no definable limits but will, rather,
sooner or later propose larger and still larger questions, which remove the
understanding to an entirely different scale.
The closing ‘wild surmise’ also concentrates the sonnet’s self-consciousness, its
quality of dramatizing a process of self-discovery which gives a further dimension
to the implications of the literary tenor of the poem’s metaphors. The very
imaginative energy that drives the poem forward proposes its poet as a new
force within the gravitational field in which Homer’s influence is exerted. The
‘eagle eyes’ of Cortez anticipate Keats’s own repeated image of the poet as an eagle,
and the ‘wild surmise’ of his men projects Keats’s excited realization of the
potential scale of his own talent. We did, however, note earlier that the sonnet
has its limitations. It is, after all, no more than a sonnet, and not for instance an
epic. There is a literary register in the poem’s diction and phrasing that intensifies
the effects of its self-reflexivity; it is a poem about poetry, by a poet who seems to
know little but poetry, so that the revelation of his own poetic talent has a certain
circularity, which can even seem like pointlessness. Should it not be a poem about
poetry about something else? The technical accomplishment is in this context also
part of the limitation, suggesting formal facility and completeness as ends in
22   
themselves, rather than as a means to some expressive goal beyond merely the
celebration of the skill of the celebration.
But this kind of stricture takes us back to the big questions about Keats’s
achievement. Is he limited by the limited range of his experience? Is his concern
with beauty, with poetry, as ends in themselves, simply a straightforward reflec-
tion of the fact that his experience was mostly from books and art? He was not
rich, not learned, not travelled. How experienced was he in love? In sex? Did his
social class not place him outside the realm of possibility in which contemporaries
like Byron and Shelley moved so easily? He was never more than very young (he
had only just turned 25 when he died, and by then he had been gravely ill for a
year), and his life, like his poetry, sometimes seems like a succession of wishful
imaginary projections forward in time, anticipating a richness of experience and a
process of gradual enrichening self-development which was destined never actu-
ally to happen. These kinds of question can take many forms. Some recent
historicist discussions have dwelt in particular on the disabling, or at least the
formatively delimiting effects of Keats’s social class and background, in an eerie
repetition of the attacks made on him in his own lifetime.³ Younger new readers
are sometimes quick to lose patience with Keats’s abstraction and his self-
conscious interest in the claims of art, and to deem him irrelevant to the interests
of a socially engaged and politically motivated outlook, confident to make its
investments in the here and now.
It is impossible to avoid the central emphasis on art in Keats’s poetry. He
returns constantly to the question of art’s relation to experience, and he therefore
is constantly preoccupied with the status and value of his own commitments and
achievements as a poet. That is to say, his own art is always under interrogation
when it takes as its central recurring subject the claims of art. But it is important to
realize that Keats’s commitment to the imagination, and his interest in the ideal,
are not an evasion or a mode of escape from ‘reality’ (however conceived) but a
means of relationship with it. Art is not experience, but is not in pure opposition
to it either, because its materials are drawn from experience and its timeless values
must always obtain in the real time of actual artists and actual audiences. It is these
kinds of relationship which form the true central subjects of Keats’s poetry. And
the relationship between art and reality is also crucial in the formation and
distinctive identity of Keats’s highly singular poetic idiom. The language of his
poetry is at a remove from received varieties of both spoken and poetic English,
but this remove serves in Keats to produce a disconcerting linguistic vitality. His
writing is stranger than it seems, and a close attention to its detailed workings
leads us to a heightened consciousness of the strange powers of language itself.
³ See, e.g., Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Blackwell,
1988), and Jerome J. McGann, ‘Keats and Historical Method’, in The Beauty of Inflections: Literary
Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) 18–65.
   ? 23
There is another reason why it is a mistake to think of Keats as remote from

ordinary modern concerns, whether we think of his style or his subject matter. His
preoccupation with art is inflected particularly as a preoccupation with artistic
development, and more specifically with his own development as a poet. This is
easy to understand in a young writer who was unusually sensitive to his own
growth as an intelligence and an artist, and for whom this question of his own
maturation was given a sharp edge by the sense of his own mortality. Keats was a
doctor by training and would have known the implications of his family history of
early death from ‘consumption’ (tuberculosis) well before the onset of his own
symptoms (which roughly coincided with his most productive year, from mid-
1818). Nevertheless, a body of poetry which has a central thematic preoccupation
with its own evolving identity as a body of poetry, and which constantly poses the
abstract question of its own emerging quality and usefulness, might seem at best
rather too inward-looking.
But one of the most extraordinary features of Keats’s achievement is his use of
this preoccupation with his own poetic development as a metaphorical vehicle for
more inclusive concerns, which can touch any kind and any generation of reader.
There are three principal areas in which the idea of poetic development in Keats
can be understood to serve wider thematic purposes. There is, first, a broader
literary context. Keats’s concern with his own development tends to merge with a
larger representation of the development of poetry, and specifically English
poetry, within a tradition. His own development has, of course, a particular
piquancy considered in this light, because it bears on the question of his own
ultimate place within the still growing tradition (growing, that is to say, in virtue of
his own new contribution to that tradition). We have already touched on the
dependent nature of Keats’s career, the manner in which each new project is
initiated from within an effort to write in the manner of an established model.
This discernible pattern in his work builds to an enunciation of a central paradox
in the identity of any national literary corpus considered in a developmental light.
How do we comprehend each successive stage in the development of a tradition
as a moving on, which is not at the same time a leaving behind? What is the
relationship, in literary terms, between identity as a constantly new form into
which we move and identity as a fixed and completed entity, sufficient to itself?
This paradoxical problem in literary history—is the relation between Milton and
Shakespeare one of evolutionary development from a lower to a higher form?—is
one specific form for the still larger and more abstract question of identity in time.
This takes us into the second area which is at stake in Keats’s concern with
development: the development of the self, and the relation of the self as fixed in
qualities and experience at a particular moment to the self as constantly evolving,
constantly growing away from its known properties and attributes. There is often
an autobiographical dimension which is implicit in Keats’s concern with his own
poetic development, in the sense that this development images the more widely
24   
shareable problems of his own growth, not as a poet, but simply as a person. This
takes us back to the fundamental concern with time and permanence in Keats, and
his recurring attempt to place the relation of transient experience to fixed mean-
ings and values. Where does the value of experience reside? In experiences which
are inherently transient, and defined by the temporality of their existence? Or in
forms of experience which can be abstracted from the passage of time and the
physical flux of the material world, such as works of art, or dreams, or ideals? We
can see that, in this light, to talk of Keats’s poetry as uninterested in history is
irrelevant, for these are questions that bear on the very nature of human existence
in time, and that are therefore inextricably bound up with the question of the
meaning and value of history.
History is the third area which is implicit in Keats’s concern with the idea of
development, for here too there is a paradoxical relation between identity and
process. The assumption that history is inherently progressive, and that there is, or
could be, a continual development towards improved forms for individual and
social life, appears to hold out an attractive long-term prospect for humanity. But
there is a serious difficulty in such an apparently optimistic assumption, in that it
undermines the value of present and actually known experience and circum-
stances. This problem lies at the heart of Keats’s most ambitious efforts as a
poet, in the unfinished fragments of Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, and it is
implicit in all of his important writing. It is what might be thought of as the social-
historical level of those other concerns we have noted; the relation of the changing,
growing self to present experience and identity, and the relation of the individual
poetic achievement to the larger tradition, the achieved sequence, of great poetry.
The connection between process and identity, the temporal and the fixedly
permanent, is a problem not least in the identity of the poem as a work of art.
A poem unfolds, if not over a definite period of time, then at least in a notionally
linear order; it consists of parts which are understood as standing in a specific
sequence, and the reader must move through this sequence (and no other). In this
sense any poem has, so to speak, a certain narrative content, even if it is a lyric
which tells no story in the ordinary sense. Poems make their effects, at least in
part, as a developing process. But, of course, they also exist in a static way, like a
painting, and the reading of a poem can also look at a poem as if it were an object
rather than a process. Keats is very aware of these questions about how a poem
exists and works, and one of his greatest achievements, the ‘Ode on a Grecian
Urn’, is the classic embodiment of the questions at issue. But in a more general
way this problem about how a poem exists, as an object or as a process, is another
form which the Keatsian themes we have been considering can take. Indeed, the
poems thereby themselves come formally to embody, or enact, Keats’s interest in
the relations between change and selfhood, time and permanence, experience
and art.
3
Keats Amid the Alien Corn
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ll. 61–70
We don’t know exactly when Keats wrote those lines. We do know where, at what
is now Keats House, though whether in the garden or the house is an interesting
question. We can narrow the time of writing down to sometime in early May 1819.
Keats’s journal-letter to the George Keatses in America, written between early
February and the end of April 1819, speaks on 30 April of the ‘Ode to Psyche’ as
his most recent poem (Keats L ii 105). That Ode is obviously the first in the series
he was to write in the next few weeks, and there are reasons to surmise that the
‘Ode to a Nightingale’ was written next. It describes the ‘coming musk-rose’ as
mid-May’s eldest child, which seems to imply that mid-May hadn’t yet arrived. He
was listening to a nightingale which, according to Charles Brown’s account, had
made a nest nearby. Nightingales arrive in Britain from mid-April onwards, and
they sing while courting, up to nest-building around the beginning of May. The
eggs are usually laid in the middle of the month.
We can be specific about the habits of nightingales. Nowadays we can also be
very specific indeed about how Keats lived, and what he was like. As Jack Stillinger
puts it, ‘The accumulation of information from so many sources allows us to know
Keats better than most of his contemporaries knew him, even those who saw him
every day; and modern scholars who study the record undoubtedly know Keats
better than they do most people that they see every day in their own lives.’¹ That
would appear to be comprehensively borne out by the long line of Keatsian
¹ Poetry Manuscripts at Harvard/John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1990) ix.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192849502.003.0003
26   
biography, a genre in itself, beginning with contemporaries such as Leigh Hunt

and Charles Cowden Clarke, continuing through Richard Monckton Milnes and
Sidney Colvin, to Amy Lowell, and Dorothy Hewlett, Walter Jackson Bate, Aileen
Ward, Robert Gittings, Andrew Motion, and Nicholas Roe, to mention just some
of the most thorough, and important biographers. There are dozens more, resting
on an ever-growing body of scholarship. It all seems to promise, as Stillinger says,
the possibility of a virtually unique biographical completeness.
But we don’t know exactly when Keats wrote the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.
Actually it could be argued that the very scale of evidence for Keats’s biography
places a question mark over the implicit claims of the genre. When Stillinger
remarks that scholars can know Keats—know what he was writing, thinking,
doing—better than they know most people they see every day of their lives, one
can’t help reflecting that it is quite hard to recall with any precision what one was
thinking and doing oneself, for instance yesterday, or a week ago, let alone a year
or a decade back. I would say it is impossible without using some kind of
retrospective frame, which effectively shapes or even creates what is recalled.
Even the confident assertion I started with—that we do at least know where
Keats wrote the Nightingale Ode—starts to get less clear the closer up to the
evidence you stand. As in the way that a beautiful painting—say, giving the way
the light falls, or the landscape recedes, in an idealized classical scene by Claude or
Poussin—metamorphoses under physically close examination until one can only
see the marks on the canvas, the pigments, brush strokes, and impasto. As Hazlitt
puts it,
The air-wove visions that hover on the verge of existence have a bodily presence
given them on the canvas: the form of beauty is changed into a substance . . . ²
Brown’s famous account says, ‘when he came back into the house, I perceived he
had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind
the books. I found these scraps, four or five in number, containing his poetic
feeling on the song of our nightingale. The writing was not well legible; and it was
difficult to arrange the stanzas on so many scraps.’³ A manuscript of the Ode in
Keats’s hand survives in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. It looks like a first
draft; there is a probable false start, the first thirty lines are written continuously
with no stanza divisions, and thereafter there are stanza breaks but no numbering,
with a few light running corrections. It cannot be squared with what Brown says.
There is no ambiguity about the order of the stanzas in the Fitzwilliam manu-
script, neither is it written semi-legibly on four or five scraps but perfectly neatly
on two half-sheets. Perhaps Brown, writing twenty years after the event, was
² William Hazlitt, ‘On the Pleasure of Painting’, in Hazlitt Works viii 7.

³ Charles Brown, ‘Life of John Keats’, in Keats C ii 65.
     27
confusing his memories. What he describes rather suggests he was mixing up the
Nightingale Ode with the ‘Ode on Indolence’; his transcript of that shows he was
indeed muddled at first about the order of the stanzas.⁴ There are other dubieties
in determining the moment at which the poem as we know it was completed.
There are four other manuscript copies, all in hands other than Keats’s, and
themselves implying other lost copies which were the agents of the Ode’s earliest
transmission history. First publication in the Annals of the Fine Arts, and subse-
quently in the 1820 volume, further complicate the textual history. The
Nightingale Ode’s text is not controversial and not difficult to establish with
scholarly confidence, but the closer you look at it the less easy it is to say when
the poem in its received text was completed. Even the where starts to blur on
reflection. Brown’s account states that Keats wrote it in the garden on a spring
morning. But the poem seems clearly to be set at night, and in Lord Byron and
Some of his Contemporaries Leigh Hunt says that the Ode was ‘composed by
[Keats] while he lay sleepless and suffering under the illness which he felt to be
mortal’.⁵ The nightingale is not the only woodland bird that sings at night, but its
distinctive and very loud song is, of course, most striking in the dark. So it is hard
to say whether Keats wrote the Ode in the garden in the morning, or in his
bedroom at night.
In Keats’s case it is, though, very hard for lovers of poetry to resist the impulse
to try and call him, as exactly and fully as possible, back to life. His life was so
short, so attractive in its personality, so radiantly human and multifaceted in the
letters, with their idiomatic brilliance, their self-exploration, their acuity in
response to everything about the world he moved in. And there is, undeniably,
the poignancy of his illness, balanced against the intellectual toughness, the poetic
genius, that consciousness of a high calling, as Haydon described it.⁶ We long to be
able to assure him that he is indeed with the great English poets, to agree with
Matthew Arnold that he stands with Shakespeare,⁷ that his tragically early death
did not come before he had achieved a changeless work of art.
‘Only a broken heart / Conceives a changeless work of art.’⁸ Keats, and
especially the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, were clearly powerful presences in Yeats’s
mind as he collected together the poems that make up The Tower. That volume’s
⁴ For a facsimile with transcript of the Nightingale Ode manuscript in the Fitzwilliam Museum,
Cambridge, see Gittings 36–43; Charles Brown’s transcript of the ‘Ode on Indolence’ is reproduced in
MYR vii 21–3.
⁵ Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (London: Henry Colburn, 1828) 263.
⁶ ‘Keats was the only man I ever met with who seemed and looked conscious of a high calling, except
Wordsworth’; The Autobiography and Journals of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Malcolm Elwin
(London: Macdonald, 1950) 297.
⁷ Matthew Arnold, ‘John Keats’, in Essays in Criticism; quoted from The Complete Prose Works of
Matthew Arnold: volume ix, English Literature and Irish Politics, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1973) 207.
⁸ From W. B. Yeats, ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ III ‘My Table’, in The Tower (London:
Macmillan, 1928).
28   
abiding preoccupation with the paradox of a vibrant creative intelligence com-

promised by an increasingly ageing body makes the case of the Romantics a
suggestive shadowing presence. There are hints at the dullness of the older
Wordsworth, and echoing oblique allusions to the tragedy of Keats’s youthfulness.
The stanza of the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ which I began by quoting resonates
through the opening lines of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’:
That is no country for old men. The young

In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
— Those dying generations — at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
There are paradoxes in Yeats’s invocation of Keats here. The 60-year-old ‘smiling
public man’⁹ determines to turn his back on the teeming fecundity of the living
world, the country of the young, and to seek a different kind of home, in the
permanence of great art and its monuments. The world he relinquishes is caught
in an endless cycle of self-regeneration, looping round and round like the gram-
mar of the sentence, and apparently inverting Keats’s ‘Thou wast not born for
death, immortal bird, / No hungry generations tread thee down’.
The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
— Those dying generations — at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
‘Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird, / No hungry generations tread thee
down.’ In Yeats it is the generations of birds that are dying, as if Keats’s early death
aligns him with the ephemera of living things. The word ‘generations’ is part of
that distinctive vocabulary which knits all the odes together, occurring in only one
other place in his poetry, in the Grecian Urn Ode; ‘When old age shall this
generation waste’, a line obviously also in Yeats’s mind. The phrase ‘hungry
generations’ is interesting: ‘No hungry generations tread thee down’. We can set
aside the pointless debate started off by Robert Bridges about Keats’s nightingale
⁹ From the opening stanza of ‘Among School Children’, in The Tower.

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Keats and Shelley: Winds of Light

Keats and Shelley

Keats and Shelley

Geoffrey Matthews (1920–1984)

President and Fellows of St John’s College, Oxford, for electing me to a Visiting

1. Introduction: On Shelley and Keats 1

BSM The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, gen. ed. Donald H. Reiman,

xii   

   xiii

Mary L The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T Bennett,

The splendours of the ﬁrmament of time

It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the

2   

arena of their posthumous existence. The ﬁrst major commemoration of Keats’s

Byron’s dramatic death in 1824 in the cause of Greek independence was to

4   

6   

A Casement tripple arch’d and diamonded

High blushing gules; she kneeled saintly down

There was A Casement tipple archd and high

A casement high and triple-arch’d there was

8   

“Then, what is Life?” I said . . . the cripple cast

These lines could be taken to represent something close to a conclusion as Shelley

10   

Thou still unravished bride of quietness,

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

12   

pick up momentum from their interlaced character, driven by insistent run-on

details of the world in an endlessly extendable network of perceived relations

14   

¹⁴ Geoffrey Matthews, quoted in Longman i 268.

16   

   ? 17

¹ Keats Critical Heritage, Introduction 35.

18   

   ? 19

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

20   

conceived in spatial terms, with the European literary tradition thought of as

   ? 21

comprehended as a system, now charges the feeling of wonder in discovery with

22   

   ? 23

There is another reason why it is a mistake to think of Keats as remote from

24   

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

26   

biography, a genre in itself, beginning with contemporaries such as Leigh Hunt

² William Hazlitt, ‘On the Pleasure of Painting’, in Hazlitt Works viii 7.

     27

28   

abiding preoccupation with the paradox of a vibrant creative intelligence com-

That is no country for old men. The young

⁹ From the opening stanza of ‘Among School Children’, in The Tower.

Calavar; The Knight of the Conquest. A

Nick of the Woods, or the Jibbenainosay. A

The Pretty Plate; A New and Beautiful

Vasconselos. A Romance of the New World.

The Wonderful Adventures of Capt. Priest.

Western Characters; being Types of Border

The Master-Builder; or, Life at a Trade. By

The Cavaliers of England; or, The Times of