Abstract
Keats completed Sleep and Poetry at the end of 1816, at about the time that he and Percy Shelley first met; in hindsight, Michael O’Neill argues, the poem reads as an opening statement in a dialogue about the purposes of poetry that developed between the two men. O’Neill’s chapter reassesses the inception and development of Keats’s and Shelley’s literary relations, treating ‘place’ as an imaginative site of literary encounter. It argues that each poet read the other’s work with meticulous attention, as is evident from an array of echoes and references. O’Neill concludes with a discussion of Keats’s presence—that is, the place of Keats—in Shelley’s later work.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsWorks Cited
Allott, Miriam (ed.), The Poems of John Keats (London: Longman, 1970).
Barnard, John (ed.), John Keats: The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 1988).
Bieri, James, Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Biography: Exile of Unfulfilled Reknown, 1816–1822 (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 2005).
Boyle, Catherine, ‘“The Types of Didot”: John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Engagement with Enlightenment Ideas of the Self and Historical Progress’, 1–7. Academia.edu.
Cox, Jeffrey, ‘Keats, Shelley, and the Wealth of the Imagination’, Studies in Romanticism, 34 (1995): 365–400.
Dawson, P. M. S., ‘Byron, Shelley, and the “New School”’, in Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference, ed. Kelvin Everest (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1983), pp. 89–108.
Epstein, Andrew, ‘Shelley’s Adonais, Keats, and Poetic Influence’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 48 (1999): 90–128.
Everest, Kelvin, ‘Shelley’s Adonais and John Keats’, Essays in Criticism, 57 (2007): 237–64.
Gill, Stephen (ed.), William Wordsworth, The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
Hawkes, Terence (ed.), Coleridge on Shakespeare, intro. Alfred Harbage (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969).
Haydon, Benjamin Robert, Diary, ed. Willard Bissell Pope, 5 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960–1963).
Hunt, Leigh, Autobiography, 2 vols (New York: Harpers, 1850).
Jones, Frederick L., The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964).
Keats, John, The Letters of John Keats 1814–1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958).
———, The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (London: Heinemann, 1978).
Kucich, Greg, Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Park, 1991).
Lau, Beth, Keats’s Reading of the Romantic Poets (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991).
Leader, Zachary, and Michael O’Neill (eds.), Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Medwin, Thomas, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell Jr. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966).
———, The Shelley Papers (London: Whittaker, Treacher & Co., 1833).
Reiman, Donald H., ‘Keats and Shelley: Personal and Literary Relations’, Shelley and His Circle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), V, 399–427.
Reiman, Donald H. and Michael O’Neill (eds.), Fair-Copy Manuscripts of Shelley’s Poems in European and American Libraries (Garland: New York, 1997).
Spender, Stephen, World Within World (1951: London: Faber, 1977).
Sperry, Stuart M., Keats the Poet (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973).
Stevens, Wallace, The Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1955).
Tetreault, Ronald, ‘The Dramatic Lyric’ [Ode to the West Wind], in Shelley, Longman Critical Reader, ed. and Intro. Michael O’Neill (London: Longman, 1993).
Ulmer, William A., John Keats: Reimagining History (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer, 2017).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
O’Neill, M. (2018). ‘The End and Aim of Poesy’: Keats and Shelley in Dialogue. In: Marggraf Turley, R. (eds) Keats's Places. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92243-0_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92243-0_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-92242-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-92243-0
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)