Keats's Paradise Lost: A Digital Edition
You can now view Keats's annotations in his copy of Milton's great work in a free digital edition produced by Daniel Johnson and Beth Lau.
Seed grant funding was provided for this project by the K-SAA and the Byron Society of America via Romantics200/Romantic Bicentennials.
The edition was launched at the 2018 Keats's Reading / Reading Keats conference in London. The conference organisers were Anna Brown, Alissa Doroh and Greg Kucich. You can read more about the conference here.
Here's the blurb from the The Keats Library website, where the digital edition can now be found.
"John Keats’s complete, two-volume copy of Paradise Lost is unique as a major work of English literature and formative influence on Keats’s poetry that is heavily marked and annotated throughout solely in Keats’s hand. It provides a remarkable record, not just of the poet’s response to Milton’s epic poem, but of his reading practices, aesthetic tastes, and habits of mind more broadly.
Keats gave these volumes to Maria Dilke before he left for Italy; the second volume is inscribed “Mrs Dilke from / her sincere friend / J. Keats.” Keats’s Paradise Lost remained in the Dilke family throughout the nineteenth century. Both volumes contain C. W. Dilke’s bookplate, and they eventually were donated to the Hampstead Libraries by his grandson Sir Charles Dilke as part of the valuable Dilke bequest. They now belong to Keats House in Hampstead and are housed in the London Metropolitan Archives."
The books can sometimes be seen on display in Keats's Parlour in Keats House, Hampstead, following a temporary exhibition entitled "Keats and Milton: Paradise Lost" in 2017-18.
Looking for more digital editions of manuscripts? Don't forget to check out the Shelley-Godwin Archive, which includes free access to manuscript images of works by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and William Godwin.
Some tweets from the 2018 Keats's Reading / Reading Keats conference can be found on the hashtag #ReadingKeats
Susan Wolfson (her poetry is soon to appear in the Byron Journal) was inspired by Keats's reading of Milton, and composed this short piece of verse. Enjoy!:
A bat, a cat, a poet
the ears of a cat
stay awake, moving in sleep
periscoping to keep
the world at a catch.
in the meanwhile of night
the echolocation of a bat
sounding a blind of flight
finds a path with dispatch.
John Milton, bereft of sight,
imagined all paradises lost,
musing in pentameter at night
and weighing each pang that it cost.
As Keats was rereading
Paradise Lost one morning
He wrote in the margins
"--it can scarcely be conceived
how Milton’s Blindness might here ade
the magnitude of his conceptions
as a bat in a large gothic vault.—"
-Susan Wolfson, 2019