Keats’s Anatomy of Melancholy: Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems (1820)

A detailed study of John Keats’s classic volume of poetry published in 1820 considered in the light of the history of melancholy

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.