“The Eve of St. Agnes” was written in the winter beginning the year 1819. Then came “Hyperion,” of which two versions remain, both fragmentary. The first version (begun perhaps as early as October or September 1818), the only one which Keats himself published, is in all respects by far the better. He was much under the spell of Milton while he wrote it; and finally he gave it up in September 1819, declaring that “there were too many Miltonic inversions in it.” He went so far as to say in a letter written in the same month that “the ‘Paradise Lost,’ though so fine in itself, is a corruption of our language—a northern dialect accommodating itself to Greek and Latin inversions and intonations.” “Hyperion” was included in Keats’s third volume at the request of the publishers, contrary to the author’s own preference. One may readily infer that it was to “Hyperion” that he referred when, in the preface to “Endymion,” he spoke of returning to Grecian mythology for another subject: the full length of the poem was to have been ten books.
“Lamia” was the last poem of considerable length which Keats brought to completion and published. It seems to have been begun towards the summer of 1819, and was written with great care, after a heedful study of Dryden’s methods of composition. On September 18, 1819, Keats wrote: “I am certain there is that sort of fire in it which must take hold of people in some way, give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensations.” The subject was taken from Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy,” in which there is a reference to the “Life of Apollonius” by Philostratus as the original source of the legend.
The volume—entitled “Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and other Poems”—came out towards the beginning of July 1820, when the malady of Keats had reached an advanced and alarming stage. At the beginning of September Keats wrote to Brown—“The sale of my book is very slow, though it has been very highly rated.” I am not aware that there is any other record to show how far the publication may ultimately have approached towards becoming a commercial success; nor indeed would it be altogether easy to define the date at which Keats became a recognized and uncontested poet of high rank, and his works a solid property. His early death, at the beginning of 1821, must have formed a turning-point—not to speak of the favourable notice of “Endymion,” and subordinately of the “Lamia” volume, which appeared in The Edinburgh Review, Jeffrey being the critic, in August 1820. Perhaps Jeffrey’s praise may have facilitated an arrangement which Keats made in September 1820—the sale of the copyright of “Endymion” to Messrs. Taylor and Hessey for £100; no second edition of the poem appeared, however, while he was alive. I should presume that, within five or six years after Keats’s decease, ridicule and rancour were already much in the minority; and that, by some such date as 1835 to 1840, they had finally “hidden their diminished heads,” living only, with too persistent a life, in the retributive memory of men.
Some of the shorter poems in the “Lamia” volume must receive brief mention here. The “Ode to Psyche” was written in February 1819, and was termed by Keats the first poem with which he had taken pains—“I have for the most part dashed off my lines in a hurry.” “To Autumn,” the “Ode on Melancholy,” and the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” succeeded. The “Ode to a Nightingale” was composed at Hampstead in the spring of 1819 after breakfast, forming two or three hours’ work: thus we see that the nocturnal imagery of the ode was a general or a particular reminiscence, not actual to the very moment of composition. This poem and the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” were recited by Keats to Haydon in a chaunting tone in Kilburn meadows, and were published in the serial entitled “Annals of the Fine Arts.” The urn thus immortalized may probably be one preserved in the garden of Holland House.
With the “Lamia” volume we have come to the close of what Keats published during his lifetime. Something remains to be said of other writings of his—almost all of them earlier in date than the publication of that volume—which remained imprinted or uncollected at the time of his death.
In [February] 1818 Keats, Leigh Hunt, and Shelley, undertook to write a sonnet each upon the river Nile. In order of merit, the three sonnets are the reverse of what one might have been willing to forecast. I at least am clearly of opinion that Hunt’s sonnet is the best (though with a weak ending), Keats’s the second, and Shelley’s a decidedly bad third. The leading thought in each sonnet is characteristic of its author. Keats adheres to the simple natural facts of the case, while Hunt and Shelley turn the Nile into a moral or intellectual symbol. Keats says essentially that to associate the Nile with ideas of antique desolation is but a delusion of ignorance, for this river is really rich and fresh like others. Hunt makes the Egyptian stream an emblem of history tending towards the progress of the individual and the race; while Shelley reads into the Nile a lesson of the good and the evil inhering in knowledge.
“The Eve of St. Mark”—a fragment which very few of Keats’s completed poems can rival in point of artist-like feeling and writing—belongs to the years 1818–9. I find nothing in print to account for his leaving it unfinished.
In May 1819 Keats had an idea of inventing a new structure of sonnet-rhyme; and he sent to his brother and sister-in-law a sonnet composed accordingly, beginning—
“If by dull rhymes our English must be chained.”
He wrote: “I have been endeavouring to discover a better sonnet-stanza than we have. The legitimate does not suit the language well, from the pouncing rhymes. The other appears too elegiac, and the couplet at the end of it has seldom a pleasing effect. I do not pretend to have succeeded.” Keats’s experiment reads agreeably. It comprises five rhymes altogether; the first rhyme being repeated thrice at arbitrary intervals; and the last rhyme twice in lines twelve and fourteen.