Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, And Other Poems (1820) as a Unified Volume

Abstract

Whereas most books on Keats’s poetry, including most editions of his works, present and deal with individual poems singly and in the chronological order and biographical contexts of their composition with an implicit aim of demonstrating Keats’s development from ‘juvenilia’, to ‘maturity’ and giving priority to the Odes, I shall instead focus on the likelihood that Keats consciously shaped the contents into a considered structure and order, in order to create a unified whole. Recognising this provides a fresh significance and perspective to the individual poems, allowing them to be read in interrelated ways, instead of as individual works interpreted in the light of when and where they were composed. The one important qualification I shall argue for is that there is evidence that Keats intended ‘Ode to Melancholy’ to be the final poem in the collection, and that he regarded the inclusion of ‘Hyperion: A Fragment’ as a publisher’s decision with which he did not necessarily agree.