Keats's Anatomy of Melancholy

This book is conceived as a sustained critical study of John Keats’s collection of poems, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, And Other Poems (1820). It was published in the 2020 bicentenary. It treats the collection as an authorially organised and thematically unified volume rather than as a collection of occasional poems. An important thread, which I follow through the volume as a major unifying principle, has also gone largely unnoticed by critics, since it is not self-evident when we read the poems individually and outside the book’s overarching intellectual context. The guiding theme behind 1820 I propose, is the persistent emphasis on different shades and types of an ancient major medical condition and literary preoccupation in Renaissance and Romantic poetry, namely melancholy, which was of interest to Keats through his medical training, temperament, and his delighted reading of Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. This emotional area was considerably richer and more complex than today’s paler reflection in the word ‘melancholy’, and it could range between suicidal thoughts, love illness, manic hilarity, and inspired creativity in poetry, art and music. In this design the clinching closure comes with ‘Ode on Melancholy’, which exuberantly attributes value to the emotional state as a form of creative inspiration driving the 1820 volume.