Melancholy: From Medical Condition to Poetic Convention

Keats was a connoisseur of melancholy in all its manifestations and reinventions, deriving from the ancient medical ailment, the Renaissance ‘Epidemical disease’ (Robert Burton’s phrase) epitomised in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Jaques, to Romantic poetic cult. In a literal sense his childhood years were spent under Melancholy since, as Nicholas Roe notes, opposite the Swan and Hoop inn and livery stables in Moorgate was Bedlam presided over by Caius Cibber’s twinned statues, ‘Melancholy Madness’ and ‘Raving Madness’. When he came to study medicine and walk the wards in Guy’s Hospital, the living embodiments were to become all too real for him. Keats’s retentive memory, Roe further suggests, carried this very image in his mind to re-emerge as the slumped and despondent fallen Titans in Hyperion. The history of melancholy is vast and complex, and to keep the proportions of this book under control I present only the briefest of summaries here, in preparation for more detailed inspection of Keats’s markings and annotations on his copy of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, followed by a melancholy-centred analysis of the 1820 collection of poems.