Keats reading Byron and Byron reading Keats

Keats’s youthful admiration of Byron was quickly replaced by a hostility to his poetry that had its origin in Keats’s recognition that he and Byron were poets of a very different kind, sharpened by Keats’s awareness that Byron’s publications had secured a commercial success that owed as much to Byron’s rank as to his talent. But, this essay argues, Keats’s hostility was more complex than has always been allowed. Byron was at once the poet that Keats defined himself against, and the poet that he recognized guiltily as his own dark shadow. The essay concludes by suggesting that the complexity of Keats’s response to Byron is mirrored in Byron’s own responses to Keats.