John Keats - Endymion
Nov 26th, 2006 by Bauman
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness…”
In February 1820, one year before his death at 25, Keats wrote in a letter to Fanny Brawne, “I have left no immortal work behind me - nothing to make my friends proud of my memory - but I have loved the principle and beauty in all things.” Nine days before his death, Keats requested that his gravestone bear the lament, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
Despite Keats’ concern that his poetry would not endure, never had so brief a literary career left so lasting a mark. His first volume, Poems, which appeared in 1817, was an uneven miscellany of shorter verse, punctuated by flashes of brilliance.
Keats then turned to the writing of his allegorical “poetic romance,” Endymion. Of it, he wrote: “In Endymion, I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby became better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice.”
Keats found himself as a poet in the writing of Endymion, and the themes of his great final odes are prefigured in that poem’s celebrated first line: “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.” We offer a beautiful first edition of Keats’ Endymion, a wide-margined copy bound in full morocco.