Shelley's Adonais and John Keats

ADONAIS DIFFERS from other English elegies in celebrating its subject throughout as a more important poet than the author, which is what Shelley really judged Keats to be.1 The poem is a courteously elaborated compliment to its subject as a poet who, it is anticipated, is about to take his place among the major English poets of both past and present, whose tradition he has embodied and sustained. In Adonais conception, form, style, imagery, and allusion are all to be understood as in graceful honour of the dead.2 The elegy's formal Greek dress and densely allusive classicism are in civilised rebuke of the attacks on Keats and his supposed upstart and unlearned poetic pretensions in the Tory Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the British Critic, and the Quarterly Review, which had sneered at him as a Cockney guttersnipe.3 Keats's longest published poem, Endymion, with its sustained immersion in material from Greek myth, had been singled out for ridicule, and Shelley particularly admired the equally Grecian Hyperion, which he considered a work of genius. The predominant classical element in Shelley's elegy derives from its subtle pattern of allusion to the Greek pastoral elegies of Bion and Moschus, the Lament for Adonis and the Lament for Bion. Shelley had translated parts of both these poems, and his version of Bion has an emotional intensity which suggests that it may already have carried for him a special association with the death of his son William: Shelley's and Mary's grief for their son, and his place of burial in the same cemetery as Keats, are referred to in Adonais, stanzas xlix and li. The second anniversary of William Shelley's death (he died aged 3 in Rome) was 7 June, a day which fell in the composition period of Adonais, and it may be that grief for William imports an emotional charge into the elegy for Keats, with whom Shelley was never more than an acquaintance with shared friends.4