ABSTRACT
John Keats’s reputation, slow to develop in England, developed a great deal more slowly in German-speaking Europe. At the time of his death, Keats was not completely unknown in Germany, for the reviews of his Lamia and Endymion in the Monthly Review and Edinburgh Review appeared in German in the Literaturblatt. In his study of the impact of Keats on Victorian poetry George H. Ford wrote: Perhaps the most important single agency in effecting the revival of Keats was the famous group at Cambridge known as the Apostles. It included Richard Monckton Milnes [later Lord Houghton], Keats’s first biographer, and Alfred Tennyson, his greatest follower in poetry. The development of Keats’s reputation among the Victorians owed more to the enthusiasm of these two men than to that of any others. In his lifetime, then, and for a long time afterwards Keats was, in Germany and Austria as in England, overshadowed by Byron and by Shelley.
