ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that despite attracting a fair share of hack illustrators, Keats's poetry profited from the fine printing that made visible the verbal pictures, or 'word painting', for which his verse had come to be chiefly valued. It is primarily concerned with the period between 1888 and 1911 when, as Haworth comments, the 'flood of Keatsian books, collected poems, single poems, selected poems and letters' were invariably accompanied by ornate illustrations and decoration. Lavish folio editions invested in the image of Keats as an archetype of absolute beauty. The author argues that the intersecting fortunes of Keat's afterlife in art at the turn of the century and the boom industry in book illustration maps onto a broader creative crossroads which draws together Victorian visual legacies, the emergence of Modern art, and a Romantic zeitgeist that preceded and permeated both.
