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LIV. Notes on Keats'S Reading

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Douglas Bush*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota

Extract

Of all the romantic poets Keats was the most “literary,” in the sense that almost all his work bears the direct impress of his really wide reading. With such a poet, of course, the process of borrowing, whether conscious or unconscious, means a process of transmutation also; hence the special fascination, and endlessness, of the study of Keats's sources. The following notes do not contribute to the interpretation of the poems, but they may add a little to our knowledge of the materials that were floating in his mind.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , September 1935 , pp. 785 - 806
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1935

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References

1 Percy W. Long, “The Purport of Lyly's Endimion,” PMLA, xxiv (1909), 178–179.

2 In his Keats and Mary Tight (1928) Mr. Earle V. Weller proves that Keats and Mrs. Tighe both wrote in English, and that they shared some current fashions in diction. Some phrases and ideas, however, apparently did linger in Keats's mind, and no one could forget her main device, which is outlined in the text.

3 See Claude L. Finney, “Keats's Philosophy of Beauty,” P.Q., v (1926), 14; Letters, i, 73.

4 Transactions of the Wordsworth Society, vi–vii (1884–88), p. 206, item 61.

5 Pausanias, i, 37, 3; Pope's Iliad, xxiii, 175, note. The passages are quoted in Knight's edition of Wordsworth (L. & N. Y., 1896), v, 396–397. Potter, loc. cit., quotes the Homeric passage, with Pope's translation, but not Pope's note. See Wordsworth's Upon Epitaphs, Prose Works, ed. Knight (1896), ii, 128.