Keats, Lamia Isabella [etc.]

Keats, Lamia [etc.] (1820); review by Charles Lamb; Examiner, July 30, 1820, pp. 494–495 (reprinted from the New Times). The Examiner, like the Gentleman’s Magazine and other periodicals that had been established for purposes other than literary reviewing, occasionally reprinted reviews from other journals. Hunt, perhaps knowing that Keats had been displeased with his review of Poems (1817), had reprinted a favorable notice of Endymion by John Hamilton Reynolds and here reprints Lamb’s praise of the Lamia volume. Hunt’s review of Lamia [etc.] appears in the Indicator (q.v.). Lamb selects individual passages and images as praiseworthy; he especially likes some stanzas from Isabella that are among the weakest lines in the volume. The two single-line quotations embedded in Lamb’s prose are from Shakespeare’s sonnets.