Biography of a Book

This chapter traces the progress towards publication of Keats’s collection which eventually appeared in 1820, its title page reading, ‘LAMIA, ISABELLA, THE EVE OF ST AGNES, AND OTHER POEMS. | BY JOHN KEATS, AUTHOR OF ENDYMION || LONDON: PRINTED FOR TAYLOR AND HESSEY, 1820’. Stung by the savage reviews and commercial failure of his previous efforts, Poems (1817) published on 10 March, 1817, and Endymion: A Poetic Romance published in early May, 1818, Keats was understandably disheartened when contemplating further publications. However, by September 1819 he was, according to Woodhouse, writing to the publisher John Taylor, willing ‘to publish the Eve of St Agnes & Lamia immediately: but Hessey told him it could not answer to do so now’. On 10 October he had spoken of writing ‘Two or three’ poems in which he wishes ‘to diffuse the colouring of St Agnes eve throughout a Poem in which Character and Sentiment would be the figures to such drapery’. He hopes that writing such poems ‘in the course of the next six 3 years, would be a famous gradus ad Parnassum altissimum—...’. Writing on 17 November, 1819, he asserted ‘I have come to a determination not to publish Anything I have now ready written’, a corpus which in fact included all the poems which were to be included in 1820. The definite decision to put together the ‘Lamia’ collection was made between the date of the letter to Taylor (17 November, 1819) and a relatively buoyant letter to his sister Fanny written on 20 December, 1819. The collection was published in late June, 1820. The result was one of the greatest poetry collections of all time, though it has rarely been considered in this integrated light since editors and critics invariably consider each poem in the chronology of its composition rather than their contribution to a unity which is greater than the sum of the parts.