Keats, Lyric and Personality

Abstract

Obituaries for Keats staked their claim for attention on that paradoxical but pervasive trope of Romantic celebrity, the narrative of neglected genius. Take, for example, this version from the London Magazine notice signed “L.,” written by “Barry Cornwall” (Bryan Waller Procter), subsequently picked up by the Imperial Magazine (December 1821), Time’s Telescope for 1822, and American journals, and quoted liberally elsewhere:

Mr. Keats was, in the truest sense of the word, A POET. […] He had a fine ear, a tender heart, and at times great force and originality of expression; and notwithstanding all this, he has been suffered to rise and pass away almost without a notice: the laurel has been awarded (for the present) to other brows: the bolder aspirants have been allowed to take their station on the slippery steps of the temple of fame, while he has been nearly hidden among the crowd during his life, and has at last died, solitary and in sorrow, in a foreign land.¹