Keats's Anatomy of Melancholy
Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems (1820)
- First, book-length critical study of John Keats’s collection of poems, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, And Other Poems (1820)
- Considers the anthology as a poetically and thematically unified collection, instead of the more usual method of analyzing the poems in chronological order of writing
- Proposes that the main theme running through the volume is melancholy, a very capacious medical category extending back to ancient Greco-Roman writers, through the Renaissance, and the subject of literary cults in the Romantic age
- The first detailed study of Keats’s markings and annotations on his copy of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) which was his favourite book during 1819 when he was writing the poems
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.
Part I: UNITY
1. Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, And Other Poems (1820) as a unified volume.2. Biography of a book3. Multi-dimensional unity: ‘A dozen features of propriety’
Part II: MELANCHOLY
4. Melancholy: from medical condition to poetic convention5. Keats as a reader of Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy6. ‘Moods of my own Mind’. Keats’s anatomy of melancholy: The poems in 1820
Keats’s Anatomy of Melancholy is both a fine book and a fitting tribute to the 1820 volume, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems, published as it is two hundred years after the collection it commemorates and does such a scrupulous job of examining. [...] White combines a bibliographic approach with close reading... The result is an engaging and erudite book, which helped me see the final published volume of verse and many of its poems in a fresh light.
As the most in-depth study to date of The Anatomy of Melancholy as an important intertext for Keats’s 1819 poetry; of the Lamia volume as a unified whole; and of the pervasiveness of sorrow and mental suffering in Keats’s work, White’s book makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on the poet.
White makes a very convincing case that ought to alter the way these poems are read in the future [...] Keats’s Anatomy of Melancholy makes a compelling case for understanding Burton’s book as part of a multifarious dialogue that provoked some of Keats’s deepest reflections on the creativity and pathology of the imagination (and their inter-relation). [...] Deeply attentive to Keats’s own attention to the words on the page, it shows how Burton’s words could spark with the poet’s own powder trails of thought to provide one of the great firework displays of the period’s poetry.
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 Melancholy for Keats’s poetry. White goes where noone has gone before: he unravels and decodes the marvellous pyrotechnics of Burton’s proto-psychological medical text into a deepened, enhanced understanding of Keats’s final collection.
