Shelley and Keats Revisited: The 1820 Volumes

ABSTRACT Shelley and Keats published their most important poetry collections in the summer of 1820, Keats’s Lamia, Isabella and The Eve of St Agnes and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, both with ‘other poems’ which became famous staples of Victorian anthologies. The 1820 volumes include the poets’ anguished self-portraits, defining Romanticism for later readers. The poems also should be read as the poets’ continuing dialogue about the nature and function of art. For Keats, great art is a ‘balm and comfort’ to suffering humanity, uniting beauty and truth, implicitly telling later generations: ‘that is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.’ Shelley, in contrast, is a prophet of revolution. Driven by his ‘passion for reforming the world’, he sees art as an intercessor between the oppressed and their society, urging by precept and example that human beings have the power to change their lives. The dialogue goes back to the earliest works of the poets, and remains unresolved in their last unfinished works, Shelley’s Triumph of Life and Keats’s Fall of Hyperion. For us, the dialogue, still unresolved, remains of supreme interest.