Keats, Burns, and Scotland

This chapter gives additional proof of the importance of Burns to Keats, and explores the difficulties he experienced in making poetry out of Scottish scenery or paying tribute to Burns. The first part adds to the evidence of Burn’s popularity for Keats and his circle, and argues that Keats’s three early verse epistles are indebted to the example of Burns’s verse letters to fellow poets. The second explores the uncertain textual status of his three poems on Burns (‘On visiting the Tomb of Burns’, ‘This mortal body of a thousand days’, and ‘There is a joy in footing slow’), all composed during his Northern walk, and how they embody the extreme difficulty which Keats, despite his high expectations, experienced in coming to terms with Burns’s genius and the grandeur of Scottish scenery. Keats had to realize that neither Burns’s example or the grandeur of mountains was directly translatable into his own poetry. Instead, the experiences of his Northern walk were to be instrumental in the creation of Hyperion that autumn.