ABSTRACT
John Hamilton Reynolds was one of Keats’s most consistent and critically informed admirers, asserting, in his review of Keats’s Poems in the Champion, that Keats was likely to ‘eclipse’ nearly all contemporary poets. Lack of time or commitment to writing could have been possible factors preventing the production of a longer memoir. Keats was living with Charles Brown and so mixing with different people. Reynolds does not dwell on Keats the poet, unlike Procter and Shelley, but hints at Keats the man and friend. He does not go into much detail, probably not wanting to exploit his connection with the poet in an unseemly way. Keats’s missing poems form a ghostly presence (or absence) behind Reynolds’s work. There is a tremendous poignancy in this, the self-confessed last volume of poems by the one-time most precocious writer of his generation, paying tribute to the demise and ‘frustrating’ waste of his talented friend.
