Published Forman (1883). G and Allott reject this poem. It occurs in the Keats-Wylie Scrap-Book, and is unsigned, though copied out by George Keats. The verses may represent Keats’s attempt to reconcile himself to the death of his grandmother in December 1814. The weakness of the lines is not conclusive evidence against Keats’s authorship: he was still ill-formed as a poet at this stage. See Bate (1963), pp. 39–40n. Texts (pp. 271–2) also rejects.

TO CHATTERTON

Written early spring 1815. Published 1848. Thomas Chatterton (1752–70), who came of humble origins, fabricated a number of poems purporting to be the work of an imaginary fifteenth-century poet, Thomas Rowley. The fraud was exposed in 1777 and 1778 by Thomas Tyrwhitt, but the poems are nevertheless the product of a remarkably gifted writer. Chatterton moved to London in 1770, but despite the success of his burlesque opera, The Revenge, he was reduced to despair by poverty, and poisoned himself with arsenic at the age of seventeen. For the Romantics he became a symbol of society’s neglect of the artist. Keats dedicated Endymion to him, and mentions him in To George Felton Mathew 56. In September 1819 he wrote, ‘The purest english… is Chatterton’s – The Language had existed long enough to be entirely uncorrupted of Chaucer’s gallicisms and still the old words are used – Chatterton’s language is entirely northern – I prefer the native music of it to Milton’s cut by feet’ (L II, 212). For his influence on Keats, see Gittings (1956), pp. 88–97.

4 wildly] W2–3, G, Allott; mildly 1848, Garrod (OSA).

6 murmurs ] W2–3, Allott; numbers 1848, G.

8 flower] W2–3; flower’ts 1848, G, Allott.

8 amate daunt, subdue (archaic). Like ‘elate’ (1. 5), ‘ingrate’ (l. 12) and ‘floweret’, this echoes Chatterton’s usage, who took it from Spenser. Keats’s fondness for ‘-ate’ endings persisted.

WRITTEN ON THE DAY THAT MR LEIGH HUNT LEFT PRISON

Written 2 February 1815. Published 1817. Hunt had just finished a two-year sentence for libelling the Prince Regent in the Examiner. Keats did not meet Hunt until October 1816, but his influence is apparent on the poetry until 1817. Cowden Clarke lent Keats copies of the Examiner.

TO HOPE

Written February 1815. Published 1817. Composed when Keats was living in as an apprentice with the surgeon, Thomas Hammond, in Edmonton (1. 1). The family was dispersed after the death of Keats’s grandmother.