Afterlife

Illustration by W. B. Macdougall in an 1898 edition of Isabella, or the Pot of Basil. Checklist 50 For almost a century, the John Keats of the reading public was the “unhappy and beautiful youth of genius” perfectly suited to the Victorian and feminine ideal. The poet and his work were reborn twenty-seven years after his death when Richard Monckton Milnes published The Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats, the first biography of the English poet in 1848. This work, heavily based on the correspondence and poems held by friends and family, was responsible for bringing about a favorable reassessment of the poet’s merits. Keats’s letters, especially those to Fanny Brawne published in 1878, provided not only a valuable gloss for his poems but, more important, offer a profound and sustained thesis in poetics. T.S. Eliot described the letters “as certainly the most notable and most important ever written by any English poet” (The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 1933). These texts revealed the spirit and genius informing the poetry as well as Keats’s perfectly masculine nature, his intellectual vigor, and his original assessments of the art of poetry.

Having been revived, Keats’s reputation was thrown into the crucible for recasting. Alfred Lord Tennyson considered him the greatest poet of the nineteenth century and Matthew Arnold, though more ambivalent, praised his intellectual and spiritual passion. Poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who chose Keats as spiritual leader of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, declared he had discovered and popularized Keats’s verses between 1844 and 1846. Regardless of the accuracy of this claim, it was Rossetti who perceived the gothic qualities of Keats’s poetry and who fired the movement that would incorporate them into graphic and literary work. Keats inspired both Rossetti and John Ruskin to create the imaginary world of Victorian medievalism. William Michael Rossetti, the unofficial organizer and bibliographer of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, studied and wrote about Keats, though he preferred Shelley. John Everett Millais (Isabella in 1849) and William Holman Hunt (The Eve of St. Agnes) were among the nineteenth-century artists who found in Keats subjects for their paintings.

Title page to The Sonnets of John Keats. Checklist 30. It was not until the early twentieth century that scholars had access to the materials necessary for critical study and reassessment of John Keats. The major Keats bibliography would not appear until mid-century when J. R. MacGillivray, Professor of English, University College, University of Toronto, published Keats: A Bibliography and Reference Guide with an Essay on Keats' Reputation in University of Toronto Department of English Studies and Texts, No. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1949). This volume covers the poet’s work from 1816–1946. A second printing was issued in 1968 with minor revisions and this remains the standard bibliography for Keats. Other sources for Keats bibliography include the new Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature and the annual bibliographies appearing in the Keats-Shelley Journal, PMLA, and English Language Notes. Online bibliographies appear, and disappear, with great regularity, as do online texts.

Keats study has flourished in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with over 3250 monographic titles published to date. The whole of his surviving literary output is currently available in print and increasingly online. Since 2000 over three hundred titles of Keats biography, criticism, and assessment, have appeared. Keats has survived criticism and the vagaries of fashion. His poetry is among the best-known and most often quoted in the English language. Two centuries have passed and John Keats has transcended characterization—“poet’s poet,” “critic’s poet,” “Romantic poet”—and as a poetic master speaks to each succeeding age in a voice that resonates with the individual and the generation.

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