John Keats and the perils of posterity

John Keats and the Perils of Posterity traces the development of Keats’s reputation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, exploring how and why ideas of his poetic achievement changed. Attacked by the critics and consigned to oblivion at his death in 1821, on the centenary of his death Keats was famous and acclaimed as a poetic genius alongside Chaucer, Spenser, Sheakespeare, and Milton. How, then, did this extraordinary change in Keats’s reputation come about? Documenting newspaper reports of his death (much more numerous than has been acknowledged) and early tribute poems, elegies, and plans for a memoir, the book draws in Keats’s circle of friends such as Charles Brown, John Taylor, Benjamin Bailey, John Hamilton Reynolds, and Isabella Jones and significant later generations including Alfred Tennyson, John Clare, Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett, and the Pre-Raphaelites. Its central focus is Richard Monckton Milnes’s pioneering biography Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats published in 1848. The making of Milnes’s book and his various sources are explored in detail, as are his biography’s effects on Keats’s reputation in the later nineteenth century as new editions of his poems and further biographies of him started to appear. Detailed attention is given to the later lives of Keats’s sister Fanny and his fiancée Fanny Brawne. The closing pages touch on the long life of Joseph Severn, the establishment of the Keats-Shelley House at Rome and the opening of Keats House at Hampstead—the centenary of which will be celebrated in 2025.