RE: Keats’s 27 October 1818 letter to Richard Woodhouse

The end of October 2018 marks the bicentenary of Keats’s iconic letter on the ‘poetical Character’. The letter of 27 October 1818, now one of the key sources of Keats’s poetic philosophy, emerged two hundred years ago from a period of distress and despair. Two months before the letter was written, Keats was sent home from Scotland to Tom’s failing condition. By ‘Sunday Evening Oct. 4. 1818’, Keats was deeply troubled by Tom’s predicament, circling the words ‘poor Tom’ along his reading of King Lear. Adding to the stress of nursing his dying brother are the hostile reviews of Blackwood’s and the Quarterly Review. Croker’s criticism of Endymion in the Quarterly upset Keats severely. Charles Cowden Clarke recalled, in his letter of 27 July 1821 to the Morning Chronicle, the sleepless night in early October 1818, when Keats ‘lain awake through the whole night talking with sensitive-bitterness of the unfair treatment he had experienced’.

In this blogpost, I discuss the context from which Keats’s letter emerges, along with his reflection on the limitations and powers of Wordsworth. I also explore Keats’s definition of the poetical character, as well as his ideas on poetical empathy and sympathetic imagination.