(a) Of this room Hunt wrote: “Keats’s Sleep and Poetry is a description of a parlour that was mine, no bigger than an old mansion’s closet.” Correspondence I, p. 289. See also Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries, p. 249.
(b) Further description of the same room is to be found in Shelley’s Letter to Maria Gisborne, ll. 212-217.
(c) Clarke refers to it in the Gentleman’s Magazine, February, 1874, and in Recollections of Writers, p. 134. In the letter he says that a bed was made up in the library for Keats and that he was installed as a member of the household. Here he composed the framework of the poem. Lines 325-404 are “an inventory of the art garniture of the room.”
(d) The most intresting record in regard to the room is that given by Mrs. J. T. Fields in a Shelf of old Books, who says that her husband saw the library treasures which had inspired Keats—Greek casts of Sappho, casts of Kosciusko and Alfred, with engravings, sketches and well-worn books. Among the books collected by Mr. Fields was a copy of Shelley, Coleridge and Keats bound together, with an autograph of all three men, formerly owned by Hunt. The fly leaf “at the back contained the sonnet written by Keats on the Story of Rimini.”
[183] The two sonnets were published in The Examiner of September 21, 1817; Keats’s had been included previously in the Poems of 1817; Hunt’s appeared later in Foliage, 1818.
[184] This did not appear in 1817, but belongs to this period. See Works, II, p. 257. For a comparison of these two sonnets with Shelley’s on the same Subject, see Rossetti’s Life of Keats, p. 110.
[185] Works, II, p. 166.
[186] Compare with A Dream, after Reading Dante’s Episode of Paolo and Francesca, 1819. (Works, III, p. 16.)
[187] A pocket-book given Keats by Hunt and containing many of the first drafts of the sonnets belonged to Charles Wentworth Dilke. It is still in the possession of the Dilke family.
[188] For instances of Keats’s interest in politics, see To Kosciusko, To Hope, ll. 33-36, and scattered references to Wallace, William Tell and similar characters. Most of these references have already been called attention to by others.