ABSTRACT
Shelley’s Adonais proved to be the most important influence upon the development of Keats’s reputation in the nineteenth century and any anthology which omitted it would seriously misrepresent Keats’s ‘after-fame’. In fact, as Shelley was undoubtedly aware, the power of Adonais relies on the fact that it does not dwell upon the messy details of Keats’s last days. By the end of Adonais, Keats – or Adonais in his new idealised form – is imagined to be living, albeit in an abstract capacity, while the world he has left behind is murky and dead. Although Shelley narrates the story that Keats was driven to death by harsh reviews, the excessive passion with which he writes of the critics, both in the preface and in the poem, suggests that he himself feels his own denigration and neglect by critics bitterly. Adonais was one of the key texts in the making of a stereotype of the Romantic poet.
