When Keats died at the age of 25, he had been actively autograph balladry for almost six years, from 1814 until the summertime of 1820, and publishing for four. It is believed that, in his lifetime, sales of Keats's three volumes of balladry amounted to alone 200 copies. His aboriginal poem, the composition O Solitude appeared in the Examiner in May 1816, while his accumulating Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and added balladry was appear in July 1820 afore his final boating to Rome. The compression of his anapestic apprenticeship and ability into so abbreviate a time is aloof one arresting aspect of Keats's work. Although he was abounding during his abbreviate autograph life, and is now one of the best advised and admired of British poets, his acceptability rests on a baby anatomy of work, centered on the Odes, and it was alone in the artistic access in the aftermost years of his abbreviate activity that he was able to accurate in ability the close acuteness for which he has been acclaimed back his death.
Keats was assertive that he had fabricated no mark in his lifetime. Knowing he was dying, he wrote to Fanny Brawne in February 1820, "I accept larboard no abiding assignment abaft me — annihilation to accomplish my accompany appreciative of my anamnesis — but I accept lov'd the assumption of adorableness in all things, and if I had had time I would accept fabricated myself remember'd."
Keats's abilities were accustomed in his lifetime by several affecting allies such as Shelley and Hunt. His admirers accepted him for cerebration "on his pulses", for accepting developed a appearance which was added heavily loaded with sensualities, added attractive in its effects, added voluptuously animate than any artist who had appear afore him: 'loading every breach with ore'. Shelley had corresponded generally with Keats back he was ill in Rome and audibly declared that Keats's afterlife had been brought on by bad reviews in the Quarterly Review. Seven weeks afterwards the burial he wrote "Adonaïs", a anxious elegy, advertence that Keats's aboriginal afterlife was a claimed and accessible tragedy:
The loveliest and the last,
The bloom, whose petals nipped afore they blew
Died on the swear of the fruit.
Although Keats wrote that "if balladry comes not as artlessly as the Leaves to a timberline it had more good not appear at all", balladry did not appear accessible to Keats, his assignment the bake-apple of a advised and abiding self-education in classical literature. He may accept bedevilled an congenital anapestic sensibility, but his aboriginal works were acutely of a artist acquirements his craft; his aboriginal attempts at ballad were generally vague, languorously analgesic and defective a bright eye. His anapestic faculty was based on the accepted tastes of his acquaintance Charles Cowden Clarke, who aboriginal alien him to the classics, and came additionally from the predilections of Hunt's Examiner, which Keats had apprehend from a boy. Hunt abominable the Augustan or 'French' school, bedeviled by Pope, and attacked the beforehand Romantic poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, now in their forties, as unsophisticated, abstruse and awkward writers. Indeed, during Keats's few years as a publishing poet, the acceptability of earlier Romantic academy was at its everyman ebb. Keats came to answer these sentiments in his work, anecdotic himself with a 'new school' for a time, somewhat alienating him from Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron and accouterment the base from the belittling attacks from Blackwoods and The Quarterly.
By the time of his death, Keats had accordingly been associated with the taints of both old and fresh schools: the obscurity of the aboriginal beachcomber Romantics and the benighted affectation of Hunt's "Cockney School". Keats's acceptability afterwards death, alloyed the reviewer's burlesque of the simplistic bumbler with the angel of the hyper-sensitive ability dead by aerial feeling, which Shelley afterwards portrayed. The Victorian faculty of balladry as the assignment of allowance and abundant fancy, offered a action into which Keats neatly fitted. A accepted agent of acoustic writing, his acceptability grew steadily and remarkably. This is attributed to several factors. Keats had the abutment of The Cambridge Apostles, a society, which included a adolescent Tennyson who was autograph Keats-style balladry in the 1830s and actuality alarmingly attacked in the aforementioned address as his predecessor. Tennyson, afterwards a acutely accepted Artist Laureate, came to attention Keats as the greatest artist of the 19th century. Thirty years afterwards Keats's death, Richard Monckton Milnes wrote the aboriginal abounding adventures of the artist (1848) which helped conductor Keats into the Canon of English literature. Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including Millais and Rossetti, took Keats as a key muse, painting scenes from balladry including "The Eve of St Agnes", "Isabella" and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci", lush, arresting and accepted images which abide carefully associated with Keats's work. In 1882, Swinburne wrote in the Encyclopedia Britannica that "the Ode to a Nightingale, [is] one of the final masterpieces of animal assignment in all time and for all ages".
In the twentieth aeon he remained the brood of poets such as Wilfred Owen, who kept his afterlife date as a day of mourning, Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Vendler declared the odes "are a accumulation of works in which the English accent acquisition ultimate embodiment". Professor Bate declared of To Autumn: "Each bearing has begin it one of the best about absolute balladry in English" and M. R. Ridley claimed the ode "is the best serenely absolute composition in our language."
The better accumulating of the letters, manuscripts, and added affidavit of Keats is in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Added collections of actual are archived at the British Library, Keats House, Hampstead, the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome and the Pierpont Morgan Library in Fresh York. Back 1998 the British Keats-Shelley Memorial Association accept annually awarded a balladry prize.
