Keats at Burns’s Grave

Burns’s tomb became the focus of Keats’s concerns about poetic fame and the complex relationship between poets and their audiences. This essay presents a new interpretation of his sonnet ‘On Visiting the Tomb of Burns’ by demonstrating how Keats’s response is inflected by several intricately connected frames of reference. Keats considers Burns’s suffering with an awareness of his poetry, the public judgement that had determined his cultural afterlife, and the poet’s two graves—the mausoleum and the obscure grave in which Burns was originally buried. These associations lead him to draw on Dante’s representation of Minos as an infernal judge. Comparing Keats’s response in 1818 with those of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, who visited Burns’s grave in 1803, I demonstrate that Keats’s ideas in the sonnet are bound up with Wordsworth’s fear of public judgement in A Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns (1816) and Hazlitt’s criticism of Wordsworth.