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Unit 6: Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats

reputation grew gradually but remarkably. His writings had the complete support of the powerful Notes
Cambridge Apostles, whose members included the young Tennyson, later a popular Poet
Laureate who started regarding Keats as the ultimate poet of the 19th century. Twenty-seven
years after Keats’s death in 1848, Richard Monckton Milnes wrote the first full biography, which
helped to place Keats within the canon of English literature. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,
together with Millais and Rossetti, were enthused by Keats, and painted scenes from his poems
including “La Belle Dame sans Merci”, ‘Isabella’ and The Eve of St. Agnes’, attractive, lush and
popular images which are closely linked to Keats’s work.
In 1882, Swinburne wrote in the Encyclopædia Britannica that “the Ode to a Nightingale, [is] one
of the final masterpieces of human work in all time and for all ages”. In the twentieth century,
Keats continued to be the muse of poets such as Wilfred Owen, who kept his death date as a day
of grief, Yeats and T.S. Eliot. Critic Helen Vendler specified the odes “are a group of works in
which the English language find ultimate embodiment”. Bate declared of To Autumn: “Each
generation has found it one of the most nearly perfect poems in English” and M. R. Ridley
claimed the ode “is the most serenely flawless poem in our language.”

The main collection of the manuscripts, letters and other papers of Keats is in the Houghton
Library at Harvard University. Several other collections of material are archived at the British
Library, Keats House, Hampstead, the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome and the Pierpont
Morgan Library in New York. Since 1998 the British Keats-Shelley Memorial Association has
once a year awarded a prize for romantic poetry.

6.1.8 Biographical Controversy

None of Keats’ biographies were written by people who knew him. Soon after his death, his
publishers said that they would speedily publish the remains and memoirs of John Keats but his
friends denied to cooperate and argued with one another to the extent that the project was
abandoned. Leigh Hunt’s Lord Byron and a few of his Contemporaries (1828) provide the first
biographical account, powerfully stressing on Keats’s supposedly humble origins, a
misunderstanding which still continues. Given that he was becoming an important figure within
artistic circles, a series of other publications followed, together with anthologies of his various
chapters, notes and letters. Though, initial accounts usually gave contradictory or very biased
versions of events and were matters of dispute. His friends Brown, Severn, Dilke, Shelley and
his caretaker Richard Abbey, his publisher Taylor, Fanny Brawne and various others issued
posthumous commentary on Keats’s life. These early writings coloured all subsequent biography
and have become fixed in a body of Keats legend.
Shelley promoted Keats as somebody whose achievement could not be detached from agony,
who was ‘spiritualised’ by his decline and too tuned to endure the harshness of life; the
consumptive, suffering image commonly held today. Richard Monckton Milnes published the
first full biography in 1848. Landmark Keats biographers include Robert Gittings, Sidney Colvin,
Andrew Motion and Walter Jackson Bate. The idealised appearance of the heroic romantic poet
who fought poverty and died young was inflated by the late arrival of an authoritative biography
and the lack of correct likeness. Majority surviving portraits of Keats were painted after he died,
and those who knew him said that they were not successful in capturing his intensity and unique
quality.

6.1.9 Letters

John Keats’ letters were first published in 1848 and 1878. During the 19th century, critics thought
of them as unworthy of attention. During the 20th century they became nearly as respected and
studied as his poetry, and are greatly regarded within the canon of English literary correspondence.

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