My glory would be to daunt and dazzle the thousand jabberers about Pictures and Books – I see swarms of Porcupines with their Quills erect ‘like lime-twigs set to catch my Winged Book’ and I would fright ’em away with a torch. You will say my preface is not much of a Torch. It would have been too insulting ‘to begin from Jove’ and I could not [set] a golden head upon a thing of clay – if there is any fault in the preface it is not affectation: but an undersong of disrespect to the Public. If I write another preface, it must be done without a thought of those people – I will think about it. If it should not reach you in four- or five -days – tell Taylor to publish it without a preface, and let the Dedication simply stand ‘inscribed to the memory of Thomas Chatterton’.
APPENDIX 3
The Order of Poems in Poems (1817) and Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems (1820) and The Publisher’s Advertisement for 1820
The Order of Poems
For a discussion of the possible reasoning behind the order adopted by Keats in these two volumes, see Stillinger, pp. 1–13, 116–17.
Poems (1817)
[The title page has the epigraph, ‘What more felicity can fall to creature,/ Than to enjoy liberty with delight’, Spenser, Muiopotomos: or The Fate of the Butterflie 209–10, with a vignette head of Spenser below. On p. vi, following the dedicatory Sonnet to Hunt, is a Note stating that ‘The Short Pieces in the middle of the Book, as well as some of the Sonnets, were written at an earlier period than the rest of the Poems.’]
POEMS
Dedication. To Leigh Hunt, Esq. (‘Glory and loveliness have passed away’)
‘I stood tip-toe upon a little hill’
Specimen of an Induction to a Poem
Calidore. A Fragment
To Some Ladies
On Receiving a Curious Shell, and a Copy of Verses, from the Same Ladies
To [Mary Frogley]
To Hope
Imitation of Spenser
‘Woman! when I behold thee flippant, vain’
EPISTLES
[Preceded by a motto, ‘Among the rest a shepheard (though but young/ Yet hartned to his pipe) with all the skill / His few yeeres could, began to fit his quill’, from William Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals II (1616), Song 3, 748–50.]
To George Felton Mathew
To my Brother George (‘Full many a dreary hour have I passed’)
To Charles Cowden Clarke
SONNETS
To my Brother George (‘Many the wonders I this day have seen’)
To… (‘Had I a man’s fair form, then might my sighs’)
Written on the Day that Mr Leigh Hunt left Prison
‘How many bards gild the lapses of time’
To a Friend who Sent me some Roses
To G[eorgiana] A[ugusta] W[ylie]
‘O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell’
To my Brothers
‘Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there’
‘To one who has been long in city pent’
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
On Leaving some Friends at an Early Hour
Addressed to Haydon (‘Highmindedness, a jealousy for good’)
Addressed to the Same (‘Great spirits now on earth are sojourning’)
On the Grasshopper and Cricket
To Kosciusko
‘Happy is England! I could be content’
Sleep and Poetry
Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems (1820)
Lamia
Isabella
The Eve of St Agnes
Ode to a Nightingale
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Ode to Psyche
Fancy
Ode (‘Bards of passion and of mirth’)
Lines on the Mermaid Tavern
Robin Hood
To Autumn
Ode on Melancholy
Hyperion. A Fragment
The Publisher’s Advertisement for 1820
Advertisement
If any apology be thought necessary for the appearance of the unfinished poem of Hyperion, the publishers beg to state that they alone are responsible, as it was printed at their particular request, and contrary to the wish of the author. The poem was intended to have been of equal length with Endymion, but the reception given to that work discouraged the author from proceeding.
Fleet Street, 26 June 1820
According to Rollins, this Advertisement was written by John Taylor. Keats commented on it, ‘This is none of my doing – I was ill at the time. This is a lie’ (see Lowell II, p. 424). ‘This is a lie’ refers only to the final sentence, the rest to the whole Advertisement. G and KC II, pp. 115–16, give Woodhouse’s draft of the Advertisement which has several important variants from the version finally printed.
APPENDIX 4
Keats’s Notes on Milton’s Paradise Lost
Keats’s annotated copy of Paradise Lost is now in the Hampstead Museum. His marginalia are reproduced in Forman (1938–9) V, pp. 292–305, which is the basis of the text here. Keats’s under-linings are marked by italics.
1 ON THE POET AND THE POEM
The Genius of Milton, more particularly in respect to its span in immensity, calculated him, by a sort of birthright, for such an ‘argument’ as the paradise lost: he had an exquisite passion for what is properly, in the sense of ease and pleasure, poetical Luxury; and with that it appears to me he would fain have been content, if he could, so doing, have preserved his self-respect and feel of duty performed; but there was working in him as it were that same sort of thing as operates in the great world to the end of a Prophecy’s being accomplished: therefore he devoted himself rather to the Ardours than the pleasures of Song, solacing himself at intervals with cups of old wine; and those are with some exceptions the finest parts of the Poem. With some exceptions – for the spirit of mounting and adventure can never be unfruitful or unrewarded: had he not broken through the clouds which envellope so deliciously the Elysian fields of Verse, and committed himself to the Extreme, we never should have seen Satan as described –
But his face
Deep Scars of thunder had entrenchd, etc.
2 ON ‘THE ARGUMENT’
There is a greatness which the Paradise Lost possesses over every other Poem – the Magnitude of Contrast, and that is softened by the contrast being ungrotesque to a degree. Heaven moves on like music throughout. Hell is also peopled with angels; it also move[s] on like music, not grating and harsh, but like a grand accompaniment in the Base to Heaven.
3 ON THE OPENING
There is always a great charm in the openings of great Poems, more particularly where the action begins – that of Dante’s Hell. Of Hamlet, the first step must be heroic and full of power; and nothing can be more impressive and shaded than the commencement of the action here – ‘Round he throws his baleful eyes –’
4 BOOK I, 53–75
But his doom
Reserv’d him to more wrath; for now the thought
Both of lost happiness and lasting pain
Torments him: round he throws his baleful eyes,
That witness’d huge affliction and dismay
Mix’d with obdurate pride and stedfast hate:
At once, as far as Angel’s ken, he views
The dismal situation waste and wild;
A dungeon horrible on all sides round
As one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv’d only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell; hope never comes
That comes to all; but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed
With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed.
Such place eternal Justice had prepared
For those rebellious, here their prison ordain’d
In utter darkness, and their portion set
As far removed from God and light of Heaven,
As from the centre thrice to the utmost pole.
Oh how unlike the place from whence they fell!
One of the most mysterious of semi-speculations is, one would suppose, that of one Mind’s imagining into another. Things may be described by a Man’s self in parts so as to make a grand whole which that Man himself would scarcely inform to its excess. A Poet can seldom have justice done to his imagination – for men are as distinct in their conceptions of material shadowings as they are in matters of spiritual understanding: it can scarcely be conceived how Milton’s Blindness might here ade [for ‘aid’] the magnitude of his conceptions as a bat in a large gothic vault.
5BOOK I, 318–21
or have ye chosen this place
After the toil of battle to repose
Your wearied virtue, for the ease you find
To slumber here, as in the vales of Heaven?
There is a cool pleasure in the very sound of vale. The english word is of the happiest chance. Milton has put vales in heaven and hell with the very utter affection and yearning of a great Poet.
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