Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-FameColvin, Sidney
General
Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame
Colvin, Sidney
Keats, John, 1795-1821; Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography
The derivation of this imagery from the passage of Keats seems evident
alike from its general conception and sequence and from details like the
anchors, beaks, targes, the prodigious primeval sculptures, the
skeletons of behemoth and alligator and antediluvian monsters without
name. Another possible debt of Shelley to _Endymion_ has also been
suggested in the list of delights which the poet, in the closing passage
of _Epipsychidion_, proposes to share with his spirit's mate in their
imagined island home in the AEgean. If Shelley indeed owes anything to
_Endymion_ here, he has etherealized and transcendentalized his original
even more than Keats did Ovid. Possibly, it may also be suggested, it
may have been Shelley's reading of _Endymion_ that led him at this time
to take two of the myths handled in it by Keats as subjects for his own
two lyrics, _Arethusa_ and the _Hymn to Pan_ (both of 1820); but he may
just as well have thought of these subjects independently; and in any
case they are absolutely in his own vein, nor was their exquisite
leaping and liquid lightness of rhythm a thing at any time within
Keats's compass. It would be tempting to attribute to a desire of
emulating and improving on Keats Shelley's beautifully accomplished use
of the rimed couplet with varied pause and free overflow in the _Epistle
to Maria Gisborne_ (1819) and _Epipsychidion_ (1820), but that he had
already made a first experiment in the same kind with _Julian and
Maddalo_, written before his copy of _Endymion_ had reached him, so that
we must take his impulse in the matter to have been drawn not
intermediately through Keats but direct from Leigh Hunt.
FOOTNOTES:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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