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Keats and Mary Tighe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2021

Earle Vonard Weller
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Extract

The first poet to cast a spell upon the impressionable mind of the youthful Keats was Mary Tighe. When Mrs. Tighe's Psyche and Other Poems was published in London, Keats, then in his sixteenth year, was fresh from school, where he had revelled in Lemprière and Spence's Polymetis. In the work of the Irish poetess the young reader found chivalric romance and Greek myth against a background of Celtic landscape and mood. The romantic melancholy and the luxuriant imagery of the Psyche touched the springs of his imagination; rhythm and phrase impressed themselves upon his memory and became a part of the fabric of his verse. The biographers and critics of Keats have done scant justice to Mrs. Tighe. Her influence upon the pseudo-Spenserian pieces of his earlier years has been recognized, but the fact that the Irish poetess was one of the most important sources of his poetic inspiration and vocabulary has been overlooked.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , December 1927 , pp. 963 - 985
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1927

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References

1 Quarterly Review, May 1811.

2 References to Keats's poems are by page, condensed title and line, as they appear in the Oxford edition of 1915.

3 Keats's Works, London 1883, I, 27n.

4 Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats, Boston 1899, p. 345.

5 Forman, finding this sonnet in George Keats's scrap-book, ascribed to his brother John, was deceived as to its a'uthorship and included it in his 1883 edition of the Works of Keats (II, 356) under the title “To George Keats, written in sickness.” Later he discovered the sonnet in the collection of Mrs. Tighe's poems, and corrected his error in the Oxford edition of Keats's Works published in 1915 (Introd., p. liv.)

6 John Keats, Boston 1921, I, 507.

7 Keats, Lond. 1909, p. 21.

8 References to the minor poems of Mrs. Tighe are by page and line, references to Psyche by canto, stanza and line. The second, third and fourth editions of Mrs. Tighe's poems are paged alike.

9 Of the twenty-eight sonnets written before 1819 which are included in The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, Oxford, 1923, seven have the sestet in cdcdcd and eleven in cdecde. Two of the seven written in Keats's favorite form were composed in competition with Keats. In the sonnets written by Keats before 1818 only three follow the cdecde rhyme form in the sestet: Leander (1816), Oh How I Love (1816) and Owls and Bats (1816).

10 Hunt's form was ccdcdd and Shelly's cdcdee.

11 The Poems of John Keats, New York 1905, p. 590.

12 The Poetical Works of John Keats, Lond. 1924, p. xxxv.

13 The Poems of John Keats, N. Y. 1905, p. 576.

14 P. L. 121; P. R. III 217.

15 Poems of John Keats, ed. G. T. Drury, Lond. n. d., p. lvii.

16 Life of John Keats, Lond. 1887, p. 183.

17 227 St. Agnes 38. 1.

18 I 61. 4.

19 The Poems of John Keats, N.Y. 1905, p. 573.

20 348 Why Did I Laugh 11.

21 The Poems of John Keats, N. Y. 1905, p. 587. Prof. De Sélincourt also suggests Chatterton but gives no reference. The word appears in one of the acknowledged poems, Elegy, as an adjective: “Joyless I see the darkling hill and dale,” Works of Chatterton, Lond. 1803, I, 65.

22 Critical notes on the Ode to a Nightingale, Oxford Univ. Press 1916, p. 118.

23 221 St. Agnes 24. 1; 25. 1.

24 237 Psyche 66.

25 348 Indolence 5. 7.

26 232 Nightingale 7. 9.

27 369 Otho 1. 2. 4.

28 172 Lamia 1. 47, 57.

29 13 Caltdore 83, 101, 103.

30 II 54. 3.

31 IV 18. 3; 21. 6.

32 VI 47. 3, 7.

33 418 Otho 5. 5. 47.

34 VI 20. 4, 7.

35 203 Isa. 35. 1.

36 The writer has in press a page-for-page reprint of the 1811 edition of the poems of Mary Tighe which is to be published by the Century Co., early in 1928 for the Modern Language Association of America (Revolving Publication Fund Series). More than four hundred parallels from the poems of Keats are there noted and indexed for cross-reference.

37 “Recollections of Keats,” Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 1861, p. 88.