On This Day in 1820: Keats publishes Lamia in his last volume

By Anna Mercer

Today on the BARS Blog we present a post on John Keats and his poem Lamia by Mariam Wassif. The ‘On This Day’ Series celebrates the 200th anniversary of literary and historical events of the Romantic period. Want to contribute a future post? Get in touch.

On This Day in 1820: Keats publishes Lamia in his last volume

by Dr. Mariam Wassif

J. W. Waterhouse, Lamia (1905)

This week marks 200 years since the publication of John Keats’s enigmatic narrative poem Lamia. While there is much uncertainty about the exact date, Lamia was published around 1 July 1820, possibly at the end of June.[i] It was the longest work in his last lifetime volume entitled Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems, including the odes of 1819. Despite its pride of place in the title and volume, Lamia remains one of the lesser known of Keats’s works except for the famous lines that accuse science of “unweav[ing] the rainbow” (II.237). The bicentenary offers an occasion to revisit this poem: written at the apex of Keats’s creativity and fixation with Fanny Brawne in the summer of 1819, but published as his productivity and health declined in …read more

Source:: http://www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=3106