In Keats’s untimely death, did Shelley foresee his own?
John Keats died 200 years ago this month, on February 23, 1821, the loss lamented in the elegy Adonais published a few months later by Percy Bysshe Shelley whose own death came the following year. The remains of both famous Romantic poets lie in the same cemetery in Rome.
It took seven weeks for the devastating news of John Keats’s death, aged 25, in Rome to reach Shelley, who was then staying at Pisa. The news came in an anguished letter from Leigh Hunt, the critic, essayist and fellow poet.
Almost immediately, Shelley began work on the elegy Adonais, the most famous and most influential response to the tragedy of Keats: the opening stanza includes the lines ‘… his fate and fame shall be / An echo and a light unto eternity’.
Shelley had the poem printed in Pisa in July, 1821, giving copies to his friends before sending it to his publisher in London. The work remained close to Shelley’s heart, literally, as we shall see, until the very end.
Composed in 55 Spenserian stanzas, Adonais was inspired in parts by the Greek elegies of Bion and Moschus, both of whom Shelley had translated, and Milton’s Lycidas which, similarly, sought to immortalise a friend who had died, in that case Edward King who drowned at sea, as was Shelley’s own destiny in 1822 at the age of 29.
