Gittings (1968), p. 93, points out a parallel between ll. 11–12 (‘I would frown / On abject Caesars’) and a sonnet by Horace Smith Addressed by the Statue of Jupiter, lately arrived from Rome, to his Royal Highness the Prince Regent, ‘Caesars, whene’er I frowned, stood petrified’. Smith’s poem appeared in the Examiner, 27 October 1816. October-November 1816 therefore seems a likely period for Keats to have written his poem. Allott argues for March 1817. Published 1848.

ON LEAVING SOME FRIENDS AT AN EARLY HOUR

Probably written October-November 1816 in response to Keats’s entry into the circle surrounding Hunt in Hampstead. Keats met Hunt for the first time somewhere between 9 and 27 October. Published 1817.

3 tablet see To my Brother George 126n (p. 568).

6 car chariot (poeticism).

‘KEEN, FITFUL GUSTS ARE WHISPERING HERE AND THERE’

Written October or early November 1816 after a visit to Leigh Hunt’s cottage in the Vale of Health, Hampstead. Published 1817. Composed ‘on the day after one of our visits’ according to Cowden Clarke, p. 134. Keats would have had to walk over five miles to get back to his lodgings in London.

13–14 lovely Laura… faithful Petrarch Petrarch (1304–74) epxressed his spiritualized passion for Laura in his Canzoniere. In his cottage Hunt had a portrait of the famous lovers, which is mentioned again in Sleep and Poetry 389–91.

ADDRESSED TO HAYDON (‘Highmindedness, a jealousy for good’)

Date uncertain, but possibly written after Keats’s first visit to Haydon’s studio, 3 November 1816. However, it could have been written before the two men had met. Gittings thinks a date in March more likely. Published 1817. Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786–1846) was a successful historical painter at this point, and a friend of Wordsworth, Reynolds and Hunt, through whom Keats met him. From 1812 Haydon had carried out a vigorous war with the Academy in the pages of the Examiner, continued later in Annals of the Fine Arts. A man of energy, convinced of his own genius, Haydon was an important influence on Keats, and tried to turn him away from Hunt’s manner. Haydon’s devotion to art, his ‘gusto’, his admiration for Shakespeare, and his love of the Elgin Marbles came at a crucial point in Keats’s development (see On Seeing the Elgin Marbles). Further see Bate (1963), pp. 97–101, and Jack, pp. 23–57.

6 ‘singleness of aim’ quoted from Wordsworth’s Character of the Happy Warrior (1807), 40.

11–12 Haydon played an active part in the campaign to persuade the Government to purchase the marble reliefs brought back from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin in 1803, and offered for sale to the nation in 1811. The Government gave way early in 1816.

TO MY BROTHERS

Written 18 November 1816 to mark Tom Keats’s seventeenth birthday. Published 1817. It probably celebrates the brothers’ coming together in their new lodgings at 76 Cheapside.

ADDRESSED TO [HAYDON] (‘Great spirits now on earth are sojourning’)

Sent to Haydon in a letter, 20 November 1816 (L I, p. 117). Probably composed on the evening of 19 November, after dining with Haydon, or the following morning.