"The Eve of St. Agnes" was written in the winter beginning the year 1819. Then came "Hyperion," of which two versions remain, both fragmentary. The first version (begun perhaps as early as October or September 1818), the only one which Keats himself published, is in all respects by far the better. He was much under the spell of Milton while he wrote it; and finally he gave it up in September 1819, declaring that "there were too many Miltonic inversions in it." He went so far as to say in a letter written in the same month that "the 'Paradise Lost,' though so fine in itself, is a corruption of our language--a northern dialect accommodating itself to Greek and Latin inversions and intonations." "Hyperion" was included in Keats's third volume at the request of the publishers, contrary to the author's own preference. One may readily infer that it was to "Hyperion" that he referred when, in the preface to "Endymion," he spoke of returning to Grecian mythology for another subject: the full length of the poem was to have been ten books. "Lamia" was the last poem of considerable length which Keats brought to completion and published. It seems to have been begun towards the summer of 1819, and was written with great care, after a heedful study of Dryden's methods of composition. On September 18, 1819, Keats wrote: "I am certain there is that sort of fire in it which must take hold of people in some way, give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensations." The subject was taken from Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," in which there is a reference to the "Life of Apollonius" by Philostratus as the original source of the legend.