ABSTRACT
Commentators have traditionally seen the poem as marking John Keats’s ‘recommitment’ to poetry after the lull following Endymion’s completion; it has also been seen as articulating John Keats’s desire to mature as a writer. The idea that Keats may have been thinking of the king is strengthened by the fact that on the following day, 22 January, he wrote his famous sonnet ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’. Reluctantly accepting the challenge set by Leigh Hunt to write on the literary patriarch, Keats comes up with a poem that is really and intricately about refusing to write on John Milton. The feudal relations supposed to pertain between Keats and Milton, ‘Chief of organic numbers’, are certainly suggested in Keats’s ‘hot and flush’d’ reaction to the mere ‘vassal’ of ‘Milton’s power’. However, elsewhere the poem strenuously contests the terms of the relationship. In seeming to honour Milton, Keats artfully pushes him away.
