Keats to Shelley: The Last Correspondence
On 16 August, two hundred years ago, John Keats penned a letter to fellow poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, in which he detailed his thoughts on poetry. Although Keats was not to know it, it was his last to Shelley, and the pair were never to meet again.To mark the key bicentenary of what is considered as one of Keats' most significant letters, the Keats Letters Project have published the manuscript of this letter on their website, kindly digitized by the Bodleian Library, Oxford. To accompany the manuscript, esteemed scholar Susan J. Wolfson of Princeton University has written a fascinating essay detailing the events leading up to the letter being written, and analyzing the letter itself.The Keats Letters Project is the first large-scale study of the letters of John Keats, and publishes each of his letters exactly two hundred years after they were first written. Each letter is accompanied by a critical or creative commentary, which aims to provide new angles and innovative thought to current scholarship. Contributors to the project have ranged from professors and PhD candidates, to artists and authors.
The project began in 2015, and was founded by Anne McCarthy, Ian Newman, Brian Rejack, Kate Singer, Emily B. Stanback, and Michael Theune. The K-SAA were honored to have Brian Rejack discussing Keats' 'Negative Capability' letter for the blog back in December 2017.Sponsored by Romantic Bicentennials (itself a collaboration between the K-SAA and the Byron Society of America), the Keats Letters Project is an enlightening, exciting source, and vital for those of us interested in the works and life of John Keats.