The Poetical Works of John Keats, Given from His Own Editions and Other Authentic Sources and Collated with Many Manuscripts (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1895 edition. Excerpt: ... it to me, before he put it to paper, in a low, tremulous undertone which affected me extremely." Lord Houghton says the Ode was suggested by the continued song of a nightingale which, in the spring of 1819, had built its nest close to Wentworth Place. "Keats," says his Lordship (Aldine edition, 1876, page 237), " took great pleasure in her song, and one morning took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass plot under a plum tree, where he remained between two and three hours. He then reached the house with some scraps of paper in his hand, which he soon put together in the form of this Ode." The anecdote as told in the Lift. Letters. &c. (Volume I, page 245 of the 1848 edition, and page 207 of the 1867 edition) represents Brown as detecting the poet in the act of thrusting the scraps of the Ode away " as waste paper, behind some books," and names Brown as the person who put them together. I presume Lord Houghton saw afterwards that Brown must have mistaken the bearing of Keats's action, inasmuch as the other evidence does not square with the carelessness implied. It is well to put the two forms of the story together, because the earlier version is a favourite cutting for magazine and anthology notes. The fair copy of the Ode written at the end of the Endymion in Sir Charles Dilke's collection is dated " M.iy 1819." The poem was printed as long ago as July 1819, in a quarterly magazine called Annals of the Fine Arti. which was edited by James Elmes, but to a great extent informed by Haydon. The ode is the last thing in Number XIII. and is signed with a " dagger " (t). The original version corresponds in the main with Sir Charles Dilke's manuscript; and both are headed Ode to the Nightingale, not a Sightingalc. (i) Lord Houghton and Mr....