Keats begins his longest poem, Endymion (1818), with the idea that ‘A thing of beauty’ can offer us perpetual joy and keep ‘A bower quiet for us, and a sleep | Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing’. This essay takes up the idea of ‘quiet breathing’ and considers its importance in Keats’s poetry. Critical attention has tended to focus on Keats’s diseased breath and his depictions of the Titans who are ‘pent in regions of laborious breath’ in Hyperion. By re-visiting Endymion and reading ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ as it appeared alongside the sonnets, ‘To one who has been long in city pent’ and ‘On Leaving some Friends at an early Hour’, in Poems (1817), we are reminded of Keats’s interest in breathing the ‘pure serene’ of inspiration. And in a marginal comment in his copy of Paradise Lost, we find Keats himself breathing more freely.
Meiko O’Halloran (Wed,) studied this question.