Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats

John Keats · 1848

Milnes's two volumes, London, Edward Moxon, 1848, read from the scans of vol. I (lifelettersliter00keat) and vol. II (lifelettersliter02keat). Both title pages read “LIFE, LETTERS, AND LITERARY REMAINS, OF JOHN KEATS. EDITED BY RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES. IN TWO VOLUMES. LONDON: EDWARD MOXON, DOVER STREET. 1848.” The membership is the union of the two, because the book is one work in two volumes: Milnes prints much of the verse inside the biography in vol. I and gathers the rest under LITERARY REMAINS in vol. II. 66 poems were assigned from the witnesses. The 67th, Hymn to Apollo, was placed by hand, because the witness shows it and the scorer could not: the heading HYMN TO APOLLO stands on p. 255 of vol. II with the whole poem under it, and the score of 0.36 comes from OCR of the sort that gives “Chaxioteer” for “Charioteer” together with Milnes's variant “Round the patient year” for “Of the patient year”. The threshold was not lowered. Only membership is by hand. A posthumous collection, but a first printing for most of what it contains. Which of these poems it printed first was checked poem by poem against the headnotes and the Bibliographical List of Keats's Poems in The Complete Poetical Works of John Keats, Cambridge Edition (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1899), whose list sets out the contents of the three lifetime volumes, then what Milnes gathered in 1848, then what first appeared in the letters as Forman, Colvin and Speed collected them. Eight poems in this volume were printed earlier — five in The Examiner or The Champion in 1817, one in The Indicator in 1820, one in Hood's Magazine in 1844, and The Cap and Bells, whose stanzas Hunt printed in part in 1820 — and each of those carries its own first_published, which books.py release leaves alone. For the rest, 1848 is the first printing located and no earlier periodical appearance has been established, which is the sentence release writes, so no date_note is set. La Belle Dame sans Merci is in this volume but is not placed here: the corpus text is the version Hunt printed in The Indicator in 1820, which differs from Milnes's throughout, beginning with “wretched wight” against Milnes's “knight-at-arms”. Stanzas (“In a drear-nighted December”) is listed as Milnes's by the Cambridge Edition, but neither scan read here prints it: in vol. II it would fall between To Fanny on p. 286 and the Sonnets on p. 287, and nothing stands there. It is left in the compilation rather than placed on the strength of a later editor's list.