ABSTRACT
Richard Monckton Milnes’s Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats offered the first lengthy account of Keats since Hunt’s Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries and constituted the first major biography of the poet. There was immense relief amongst Keats’s squabbling friends when the news of its incipient publication was heard. Milnes did enjoy many of the advantages in life that Keats had not enjoyed. But alongside his political and social life, Milnes continued with his interest in what was considered rather unconventional literature. In the fifteen years following Cambridge, he published several volumes of poems, and at one point was expected, particularly by Walter Savage Landor, to become Wordsworth’s successor as Poet Laureate. Despite his private enthusiasm for Keats, however, he was uncertain about the book’s wider popularity. Yet, despite Fanny Allen’s scandalised reaction, Milnes’s biography contains nothing very shocking or even very remarkable.
