"A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever"
First edition, second issue. Original boards.
London: Printed for Taylor and Hessey, 1818.
Keats' Endymion was met with scathing reviews from the Quarterly Review and Blackwood's when it was first published in 1818; John Gibson Lockhart described it in the latter as "calm, settled, imperturbable drivelling idiocy." The attacks were even believed to play a part in Keats' 1821 death from tuberculosis, with Lord Byron remarking in Don Juan, "John Keats, who was kill’d off by one critique, Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate / ’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, / Should let itself be snuff’d out by an article.” In an 1818 letter to his brother George, Keats had written, "There have been two Letters in my defence in the Chronicle and one in the Examiner... I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death." Particular veneration of his works came three decades later by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who placed Keats in the same upper echelon as "Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Leonardo, Shelley, [and] Browning" (MacGillivray), above Milton and Lord Byron.
Issue points
Errata on [xi] with five corrections.
Imprint on verso of half-title: "T. Miller, Printer, Noble street, Cheapside."
[xii], [3], 207, [4, Taylor & Hessey ad dated May 1818].