ABSTRACT
Taylor’s comment captures Haydon’s sense of self-importance, which masked, and was probably influenced by, his underlying insecurity, and it suggests the discrepancy between Haydon’s self-image and the perception of him by others. These complications and paradoxes in Haydon inflect the rather ambiguous portrait of Keats which emerges from the extracts from the autobiography. Haydon was first introduced to Keats by Leigh Hunt in the autumn of 1816. At that point he was enjoying a certain celebrity as a result of the Elgin Marbles affair, which had reached a climax earlier in the year. Haydon’s other main preoccupation at the time of meeting Keats was his painting, on which he worked for six years, entitled ‘Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem’. Within a few weeks of meeting Haydon, Keats was adopting his excessive, enthusiastic style. Keats’s sonnets draw upon the discourse of the sublime and thus acquire some of the greatness of the statues which they describe and which Haydon admired.
