ABSTRACT
Keats could have become a Walter Cooper Dendy, if he had not met Leigh Hunt and made the fateful – Dendy would have said fatal – decision to become a poet. Dendy was a surgeon, fellow and later president of the Medical Society of London. The Philosophy of Mystery, from which the memory of Keats in the lecture theatre is taken, derives from Dendy’s lifelong interest in the mind. It brings together different approaches to understanding the mental state, from theories drawn from literature about the imagination to what were then early developments in clinical psychology. What is significant, however, is not the historical validity of either of the tales but rather Dendy’s presentation, his supposition that the tales are anecdotes of Keats which one might imagine are true. Dreaming in lectures or appearing half mad in conversation are, for Dendy, just the sort of things his Keats might do.
