KEATS’S ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY ANATOMY KEATS’S KEATS’S ANATOMY ‘White’s groundbreaking book combines two exceptional dimensions of Keats’s career into one compelling argument: the genius of the 1820 collection and the significance of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of OF MELANCHOLY Melancholy for Keats’s poetry. White goes where no-one has gone before: he unravels and decodes the marvelous pyrotechnics of Burton’s proto-psychological medical text into a deepened, enhanced Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes understanding of Keats’s final collection.’ and Other Poems (1820) Heidi Thomson, Victoria University of Wellington A detailed study of John Keats’s classic volume of poetry published in 1820 considered in the light of the history of melancholy This book examines John Keats’s immensely important collection of poems, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, And Other Poems (1820), and is published in the volume’s bicentenary. It analyses the collection as an authorially organised and multi-dimensionally unified volume rather than as a collection of occasional poems. R. S. White argues that a guiding theme behind the 1820 volume is the persistent emphasis on different types of melancholy, an ancient, all-consuming medical condition and literary preoccupation in Renaissance and Romantic poetry. Melancholy was a lifelong interest of Keats’s, touching on his medical training, his temperament and his delighted reading in 1819 of Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. White R. S. R. S. White is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Western Australia. Cover image: Isabella and the Pot of Basil, 1907 (oil on canvas), Waterhouse, John William (1849–1917) / Private Collection / Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images ISBN 978-1-4744-8045-1 Cover design: www.hayesdesign.co.uk edinburghuniversitypress.com R. S. White Keats’s Anatomy of Melancholy Keat’s Anatomy of Melancholy Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, And Other Poems (1820) R. S. White Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting- edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © R. S. White, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 8045 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 8047 5 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 8048 2 (epub) The right of R. S. White to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents List of illustrations vi Acknowledgements vii Part I: UNITY 1 Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, And Other Poems (1820) as a Unified Volume 3 2 Biography of a Book 19 3 Multidimensional Unity: ‘A Dozen Features of Propriety’ 37 Part II: MELANCHOLY 4 Melancholy: From Medical Condition to Poetic Convention 63 5 Keats as a Reader of Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy 93 6 ‘Moods of My Own Mind’: Keats’s Anatomy of Melancholy. The Poems 139 Bibliography 221 Index 233 List of Illustrations 1.1 Title page of the copy inscribed to Fanny Brawne from John Keats, Houghton Library at Harvard University, citation number Keats *EC8.K2262.820 l(F). 2 2.1 Keats’s disclaimers scribbled on the ‘Advertisement’ in the presentation copy to Burridge Davenport: Houghton Library at Harvard University, citation number Keats *EC8. K2262.820l (G). 18 4.1 Jusepe Ribera’s etching ‘The Poet’, Art Gallery of South Australia from the David Murray Bequest Fund 1949 (4910G183). 62 4.2 Statues of ‘melancholy’ and ‘raving’ madness, each reclining on one half of a pediment, formerly crowning the gates at Bethlem (Bedlam) Hospital. Engraving by C. Grignion after S. Wale after C. Cibber, 1680. Credit: Wellcome Library Collection CC.BY, b1183482. 64 5.1 Title page Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1628); British Library, shelfmark C.123.k.281. In the public domain. 94 5.2 Burton on Love, ‘Analysis of the Third Partition’, Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1628); British Library, shelfmark C.123.k.281 (15). In the public domain. 104 6.1 Image of the 1820 Contents page, The British Library, shelfmark C.39.b.67. In the public domain. 138 6.2 Keats’s manuscript ‘Holograph Stanza 3, “Ode on Melancholy” ’, New York Public Libraries Digital Collections, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, IMAGE IDpsnypl_ berg_1372. In the public domain. 215 Acknowledgements I am especially grateful to Nicholas Roe, John Barnard and Beth Lau for their abundance of scholarly generosity in reading portions of the book and offering valuable insights, suggestions and corrections. I am also penitent to have presumed so much on their time and attention, my only excuse being that reader response critics crave responses from readers. Needless to say, all remaining errors and infelicities are my own alone. Thanks to John Goodridge for unflagging moral support and sharing ideas from his well of knowledge of Keats and John Clare, and for his critical acumen, and humane wisdom. I owe a large debt to Ken Page and Frankie Kubicki who allowed me to spend many hours over some years poring over Keats’s copy of Burton in the inspiring setting of the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Hampstead. Gareth Evans, formerly of the Chelsea Botanic Garden where Keats studied plants, and whose website on ‘botanical and cultural histories’ is rich with information and insights, freely shared his unrivalled knowledge of medical botany in Keats’s time. Others offered specific information, help, or all-important encouragement, most of whom have no doubt long forgotten their contributions. These include in particular Giuseppe Albano, Catherine Belsey, Martin Dodsworth, Hrileena Ghosh, Claire Lamont, Michael Levine, Lo Ka Tat, Jon Mee, Meiko O’Halloran, Li Ou, Ciara Rawnsley, Erin Sullivan, Maurice Whelan, the late Robert Woof, and many others including former students at Newcastle upon Tyne and Western Australia, from whom I have learned much about the unexpected individuality of a range of ‘reader responses’ in prac- tice. My association with the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (2011–2018) provided congen- ial company and valuable interdisciplinary discussions, in particular with Louis Charland and Jennifer Radden. The Australian Research Council also funded two years’ research leave to research the book. Much of the final stretch of writing came with the uniquely gratifying viii Keats’s Anatomy of Melancholy opportunity offered by election to the Magdalen College for Senior Visiting Research Fellow in 2018, allowing me to inhabit old haunts in the Bodleian, Radcliffe Camera and English Faculty Library, and enabled me at last to meet Laurie Maguire whose work I have long admired. Over the years, through the much appreciated efforts of Mark Howe, I have also enjoyed annual migratory accommodation in another old haunt, Holywell Manor, Balliol College, which always brings back happy memories. Over a period of years, the resources of the British Library, the Wellcome Library, and the Reid Library at the University of Western Australia have been invaluable. I am grateful to the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the British Library, the Wellcome Library, the New York Public Libraries, and the Art Gallery of South Australia (one of my favourite places in undergraduate days) for permissions to reproduce images. In writing on ‘Isabella’, I have unavoidably drawn (in revised form) on material which I published in ‘Keats, Mourning and Melancholia’, John Keats and the Medical Imagination, edited by Nicholas Roe (London: Palgrave, 2017), 129–52, and I am grateful for the editor’s permission to do so. Quotations from Keats’s 1820 volume are taken from the facsimile of this text, while his other poems are quoted from John Barnard’s Penguin edition, another constant com- panion since undergraduate days, sundry copies replaced as each one disintegrated through constant over-reading. Finally, I am grateful to the Edinburgh University Press, their very efficient and congenial publishing team and the two generous anonymous readers, for making it possible to publish the book in the bicentenary year of Keats’s precious volume. Unity 1.1 Title page of the copy inscribed to Fanny Brawne from John Keats, Houghton Library at Harvard University, citation number Keats *EC8.K2262.820 l(F). Chapter 1 Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, And Other Poems (1820) as a Unified Volume The historic significance of Keats’s volume of poems published in 1820 under the title Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, And Other Poems is hardly in doubt. Walter Jackson Bate in 1963 described the collection as ‘in many ways perhaps the most remarkable single volume to be pub- lished by any poet during the past century and a half, if we leave aside collected works published by poets in their old age . .’.1 However, Bate’s biographical interest lay not in following up this insight but in tracing the chronology of Keats’s poetic development poem-by-poem in the light of his life story. More recently, Kelvin Everest in the entry on Keats in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has written, ‘This collection is now recognised as among the most important works of English poetry ever published’. Yet it has still only rarely been ana- lysed in these terms as a single collection, and although ‘The Eve of St.