Loving, Knowing, and Illustrating Keats: The Louis Arthur Holman Collection of Keats Iconography

Abstract

Ann Rowland’s chapter further examines the traffic of author-related artifacts across the Atlantic by turning to the massive scrapbooking project of Louis A. Holman, a Keats collector at the turn of the twentieth century. Holman spent over twenty-five years assembling a collection illustrative of Keats’s life, setting himself the task of finding an illustration, artifact, or photograph related to every person, place, or thing mentioned in one of Keats’s poems or letters. His quirky collection of Keatsiana toured the USA and England in the early 1900s as exemplary Keats scholarship and as a teaching tool for college English professors. In addition to examining the construction of ‘Keats’ through material objects and illustrations, this essay describes the fluid boundary between amateur and professional scholarship in these years, taking up the volume’s recurring aim of questioning the textual and professional biases of academic literary studies.