Details

Title

The Complete Poetical Works of John Keats

Sub Title

With Notes and Appendices by H. Buxton Forman

Author

Keats, John

Publication Date

1895

Publisher

Thomas Y. Crowell and Co.

Place of Publication

New York

Collection

Scans provided by and used with permission of Archival & Special Collections, University of Guelph Library. From the L.M. Montgomery Collection.

Note

Montgomery’s longest journal entry about Keats might seem surprising at first. On July 11, 1909, Montgomery recorded a long entry about finally reading the entirety of this very volume (note her inscription above, "March 30, 1909"). She says, “To-day I finished reading Keats’ poems. I got the book in March and have been reading so many pages per day ever since. On the whole, I do not like Keats. Perhaps if I had known him in childhood I might have grown up with him as to love him, tinging his lines with the hues of my own life as I lived it. But I did not and he comes to me too late. It is not because I find his poems lacking in beauty that they leave me indifferent. They are, in reality, _too full of beauty_. One feels stifled in roses and longs for a breath of frosty air of the austerity of a mountain peak towering to the stars. There is little in Keats’ poems except luscious beauty–so much of it that the reader is surfeited. At least, that is how they affected me. This is not to say that Keats has _no_ lines that appeal to me. I found them rarely but some I did find, and for those few rare lines I admit him a great poet–and he would have been as great a poet if he had never written anything except those lines.” She goes on to cite a few of those most affecting lines. From his “Endymion,” she recorded “He ne’er is crowned / With immortality who fears to follow / Where airy voices lead” and then she spends a few lines in her journal reflecting on whether and how one should follow those voices (‘The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery, The PEI Years,’ Volume I, p. 235-6). She clearly read the volume with a pencil in her hand, underlining and marking stanzas as she went. She underlined the first, famous, line of "Endymion," "A thing of beauty is a joy forever," and she underlined the line on page 115 about following where those "airy voices lead." But one particular line of Keats’--not one that she marked in the volume itself--clearly stuck with her in the decades after this first reading. Montgomery quotes from the penultimate stanza of his “Ode to a Nightingale,” in _seven_ of her novels (Kilmeny of the Orchard, Anne of Island, Anne’s House of Dreams, Emily Climbs, Magic for Marigold, Anne of Windy Poplars, and Jane of Lantern Hill). The lines: “Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”

Genre

poetry

Type of Item

association