{"title":"Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, And Other Poems (1820) as a Unified Volume","authors":"Robert S. White","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474480451.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474480451.003.0001","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":103911,"journal":{"name":"Keats's Anatomy of Melancholy","volume":"519 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124481311","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Moods of My Own Mind’: Keats’s Anatomy of Melancholy. The Poems","authors":"Robert S. White","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474480451.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474480451.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter provides close analysis of each poem in turn, focusing on the order in which Keats chose to present the poems as an interrelated and evolving set of statements on different kinds of melancholy, building upon the previous chapters. Each poem exhibits a particular kind of melancholy from the history of the affliction. As a result of the thematic perspectives adopted in the book the chapter presents fresh, integrated readings of each of Keats’s poems in his wonderful 1820 anthology:\u0000Lamia \u0000Isabella\u0000The Eve of St Agnes\u0000Ode to a Nightingale\u0000Ode on a Grecian Urn\u0000Ode to Psyche\u0000Fancy\u0000Ode\u0000Lines on the Mermaid Tavern Robin Hood\u0000To Autumn \u0000Ode on Melancholy\u0000Hyperion, A Fragment (this requires a different approach since evidence suggests Keats did not wish to include it; however, it still contributes to the ‘melancholy’ theme.)","PeriodicalId":103911,"journal":{"name":"Keats's Anatomy of Melancholy","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133166405","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Multidimensional Unity: ‘A Dozen Features of Propriety’","authors":"Robert S. White","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474480451.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474480451.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter considers the collection as a whole, suggesting some stylistic and thematic links and similitudes which establish the volume as one which has a considered unity. These facets are summarized as (1) enchantment and disenchantment (Fraistat), (2) dreams and visions, (3) the theme of loss, (4) a word, ‘adieu’, (5) bringing back the past, (6) antithetical states and contrast (7), the concept behind Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’, (8) dialectic and debate, (9) beauty and truth (10) associational logic (11) ‘stitching’ imagery (12) the theme of melancholy, which the rest of this book will explore. These aspects are analysed by moving across the collection as a whole, while the reasons behind the ordering of the poems will be considered in the final chapter.","PeriodicalId":103911,"journal":{"name":"Keats's Anatomy of Melancholy","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116047191","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Melancholy: From Medical Condition to Poetic Convention","authors":"Robert S. White","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474480451.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474480451.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Keats was a connoisseur of melancholy in all its manifestations and reinventions, deriving from the ancient medical ailment, the Renaissance ‘Epidemical disease’ (Robert Burton’s phrase) epitomised in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Jaques, to Romantic poetic cult. In a literal sense his childhood years were spent under Melancholy since, as Nicholas Roe notes, opposite the Swan and Hoop inn and livery stables in Moorgate was Bedlam presided over by Caius Cibber’s twinned statues, ‘Melancholy Madness’ and ‘Raving Madness’. When he came to study medicine and walk the wards in Guy’s Hospital, the living embodiments were to become all too real for him. Keats’s retentive memory, Roe further suggests, carried this very image in his mind to re-emerge as the slumped and despondent fallen Titans in Hyperion. The history of melancholy is vast and complex, and to keep the proportions of this book under control I present only the briefest of summaries here, in preparation for more detailed inspection of Keats’s markings and annotations on his copy of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, followed by a melancholy-centred analysis of the 1820 collection of poems.","PeriodicalId":103911,"journal":{"name":"Keats's Anatomy of Melancholy","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127114573","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Biography of a Book","authors":"Robert White","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474480451.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474480451.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter traces the progress towards publication of Keats’s collection which eventually appeared in 1820, its title page reading, ‘LAMIA, ISABELLA, THE EVE OF ST AGNES, AND OTHER POEMS. | BY JOHN KEATS, AUTHOR OF ENDYMION || LONDON: PRINTED FOR TAYLOR AND HESSEY, 1820’. Stung by the savage reviews and commercial failure of his previous efforts, Poems (1817) published on 10 March, 1817, and Endymion: A Poetic Romance published in early May, 1818, Keats was understandably disheartened when contemplating further publications. However, by September 1819 he was, according to Woodhouse, writing to the publisher John Taylor, willing ‘to publish the Eve of St Agnes & Lamia immediately: but Hessey told him it could not answer to do so now’. On 10 October he had spoken of writing ‘Two or three’ poems in which he wishes ‘to diffuse the colouring of St Agnes eve throughout a Poem in which Character and Sentiment would be the figures to such drapery’. He hopes that writing such poems ‘in the course of the next six 3 years, would be a famous gradus ad Parnassum altissimum—...’. Writing on 17 November, 1819, he asserted ‘I have come to a determination not to publish Anything I have now ready written’, a corpus which in fact included all the poems which were to be included in 1820. The definite decision to put together the ‘Lamia’ collection was made between the date of the letter to Taylor (17 November, 1819) and a relatively buoyant letter to his sister Fanny written on 20 December, 1819. The collection was published in late June, 1820. The result was one of the greatest poetry collections of all time, though it has rarely been considered in this integrated light since editors and critics invariably consider each poem in the chronology of its composition rather than their contribution to a unity which is greater than the sum of the parts.","PeriodicalId":103911,"journal":{"name":"Keats's Anatomy of Melancholy","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133322044","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Keats as a Reader of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy","authors":"Robert S. White","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474480451.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474480451.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Despite being full of weighty analysis of serious medical, emotional and psychological concerns, and wearying in its copious classical quotations and references, yet Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy is also by turns light-hearted, enlightened, and witty. And despite its claim to be based on a methodical analytical system indicated in the taxonomically arranged table of contents, it is nothing if not digressive, anecdotal, opinionated and far from systematic, proceeding instead in a subjectively driven stream of consciousness. Burton’s style reflects the Anatomy of Melancholy’s multi-faceted and eccentric aspects which appealed to Keats. His own unique and irrepressible sense of humour, often reframing grim situations with word-play, puns and droll mockery, finds a ‘greeting of the Spirit’ in Burton, and by following his markings on his copy of The\u0000 Anatomy we can see what he appreciated in a writer who in some ways was a kindred spirit. Findings from this chapter inform the next, covering style and substance which influenced Keats’s poetry.","PeriodicalId":103911,"journal":{"name":"Keats's Anatomy of Melancholy","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131024905","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}