Abstract
Keats and Brown arrived in Winchester on 12 August 1819. Brown left in the first week of September, and Keats, by this time on his own, left on 8 October. Although he felt ‘mired’ not only in his poetic reputation and through financial difficulties, but also in his helpless emotional dependency on his love for Fanny Brawne, he was at the same time proud of his recent output, which he summarises for Bailey:
Within these two Months I have written 1500 Lines, most of which besides many more of prior composition you will probably see by next Winter. I have written two Tales, one from Boccaccio call’d the Pot of Basil; and another call’d St Agnes’ Eve on a popular superstition; and a third call’d Lamia – (half finished – I {hav}e a{l}so been writing parts of my Hyperion and {c}completed 4 Acts of a Tragedy… (JKL, 2, 139)
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Notes
Vincent Newey, ‘Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, and Keats’s Epic Ambitions’, in The Cambridge Companion to Keats, ed. Susan J. Wolfson ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001 ), 69–85.
Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), chapter 6.
John Jones, John Keats’s Dream of Truth ( London: Chatto & Windus, 1969 ), 262.
Reuben Arthur Brower, The Fields of Light: An Experiment in Critical Reading ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951 ), 39.
Herbert Read, The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry ( London: Faber and Faber, 1968 ), 56.
Robert Gittings, John Keats: The Living Year: 21 September 1818 to 21 September 1819 (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1954), 187. This reference is expanded upon, and the list of sources augmented by literally dozens more, by H. Neville Davies, ‘Keats, Winchester, and the Marriage Psalm’, The Keats-Shelley Review, 4 (1989), 31–60.
Stanley Plumly, Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography ( New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008 ), 271–2.
F. R. Leavis, ‘Keats’, Revaluation (London: Chatto & Windus, 1936), chapter 7.
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© 2010 R. S. White
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White, R.S. (2010). Autumn in Winchester. In: John Keats. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230281448_11
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