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Revolution and Romanticism
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A facsimile reprint in the Revolution & Romanticism series chosen and introduced by Jonathan Wordsworth ISBN 1 85477 073 x 200 x 127 mm 230 pages |
JOHN KEATS Endymion 1818 ‘I have lately read your Endymion again,’ Shelley writes to Keats, ‘& ever with a new sense of the treasures of poetry it contains.’ He is worried, however, that the treasures are ‘poured forth with indistinct profusion...this, people in general will not endure, & that is the cause of the comparatively few copies which have been sold’. A more immediate cause was John Wilson Croker’s uncharitable review in the Quarterly Review. Keats himself felt that the poem had been a gaining of experience: ‘In Endymion, I leapt headlong into the Sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksands & the rocks, than if I stayed upon the green shore ... I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest’. £30 $50 It will be a test, a trial of my Powers of Imagination and chiefly of my invention which is a rare thing indeed - by which I must make 4000 lines of one bare circumstance and fill them with Poetry. |
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