Keats’s Influence on Shelley

The essay traces aspects of Keats’s thematic and stylistic influence on P. B. Shelley’s poetry across a broad range of works including Alastor, Endymion, Lamia, Keats’s 1820 volume, Adonais, and Shelley’s final phase as represented by ‘Fragments of an Unfinished Drama’ and his poems to Jane Williams. Their personal relations are reassessed, and the essay concludes by suggesting that the curtailment of Shelley’s life means we will never know how Shelley would have developed the ‘saddened acceptance’ of his late manner, or how his greatness as a poet might have found a defining final form.