Ode on Melancholy

During his lifetime, Keats’ poetry met with indifference or derision, with a selected group admiring his writing for its philosophical themes and sensual style. Critics from respected periodical like Blackwood’s, The Quarterly Review, and The Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review dismissed him as a lesser poet, with Blackwood’s being particularly harsh about Keats’s working-class roots. A year before his death, as Adam Kirsch notes, Keats wrote that he was reconciled to failure: “‘If I should die,’ said I to myself, ‘I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d’” (Kirsch, Adam. “Cloudy Trophies.” 2008. The New Yorker).

Keats’ tragic death, along with the fierceness of his friends and colleague’s admiration, spurred new interest and a reassessment of the negative criticism of his work. In 1822, renowned poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote his long poem, “Adonais” as a tribute to Keats, which solidified his mythos. Keats’s reputation only grew during the Victorian age when Lord Tennyson, in his capacity as Poet Laureate, declared Keats the greatest poet of the 19th century. In 1848, the first biography of Keats helped to solidify his place within the English canon. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an aesthetic movement that prized classical and pre-Renaissance artistic modes, created significant popular paintings of figures from “Isabella,” “The Eve of St. Agnes” and “La Belle Dame sans Merci” which are still popular today. Keats’ poems, especially the odes, are now considered among the best in the English language; he is viewed as a member of the Romantic Movement, which focused on emotion, the individual, and the glorification of nature.