Keats, Endymion and Lamia, Isabella [etc.]

Keats, Endymion (1818) and Lamia [etc.] (1820); review by Francis Jeffrey, Edinburgh Review, XXXIV (Aug. 1820), 203–213. Jeffrey was essentially a very humane man. It seems very likely that Hazlitt or another friend who sympathized with Keats after the hostile reception of Endymion prevailed upon Jeffrey to read the two volumes and, if he could, to notice them favorably. Or perhaps the intemperance of the attacks in Blackwood’s on Keats, grouped with Hunt and Hazlitt, had won Jeffrey’s sympathy. In either event, Jeffrey rose to Keats’s defense soon after the publication of the 1820 volume, and only his inherent distaste for contemporary poetry kept him from recognizing and fully proclaiming Keats’s genius.