Published 1817. Woodhouse wrote that Keats was here playing on the ‘idea that the diminutiveness of his size makes him contemptible and that no woman can like a man of small stature’ (Woodhouse (1817), p. 148). J. Burke Severs is probably right in thinking the speaker is a fairy, KSJ, VI (1957), pp. 109–13. Keats was sensitive about his height: he was only five foot and three quarters of an inch.

‘GIVE ME WOMEN, WINE, AND SNUFF’

Written between autumn 1815 and July 1816 while Keats was studying medicine. Tentatively placed in March. Henry Stephens, a fellow student, recorded, ‘In my Syllabus of Chemical Lectures [Keats] scribbled many lines on the paper cover, This cover has long been torn off, except one small piece on which is the following fragment of Doggrel rhyme’ (KC II, p. 210). Published H. B. Forman’s Poetical Works of John Keats (1884).

SPECIMEN OF AN INDUCTION TO A POEM

Probably written late spring 1816; Allott dates c. February-March 1816. Colvin characterized this as an attempt ‘to embody the spirit of Spenser in the metre of Rimini’. Keats had yet to meet Hunt, but The Story of Rimini had appeared in February 1816. Published 1817. Title the ‘Poem’ is Calidore.

2 compare To [Mary Frogley] 52–3.

6 Archimago the magician in The Faerie Queene I and II.

7 attitude see Ode on a Grecian Urn 41n (p. 675).

18 trembling for Keats’s use of participal nouns, see Calidore 5n.

33 lone ] long Galignani, Allott.

38 bannerol a standard, pennon (not recorded in OED). See The Faerie Queen VI. vii 26, ‘knightly bannerall’.

40 a spur in bloody field describes the heraldic device on the knight’s shield.

51 And always does my heart with pleasure dance compare Wordsworth, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ 23–4, ‘And then my heart with pleasure fills, / And dances with the daffodils.’

61 Libertas Leigh Hunt, on whose imprisonment for the liberal views expressed in the Examiner see headnote to Written on the Day that Mr Leigh Hunt left Prison (p. 559). The name is also used in To my Brother George 24 and To Charles Cowden Clarke 44–5.

CALIDORE. A FRAGMENT

Precise date unknown, but probably written in late spring 1816, immediately after the preceding poem. Published 1817. Sir Calidore, the Knight of Courtesy in The Faerie Queene VI, was a particular favourite with Keats. As in the Specimen of an Induction, Leigh Hunt’s The Story of Rimini is a strong influence on the diction and conception of the poem.

5 lingeringly Keats’s liking for adverbs made from participles was encouraged by Hunt’s example. Other examples occur in ll. 16, 31, 82, 149. Examples of this word are recorded by the OED from 1589 onwards.

7 clearness Keats’s liking for ‘-ness’ endings was also supported by Hunt’s practice.