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The Witch of Atlas and Endymion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

John Livingston Lowes
John Livingston Lowes*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

There is an extraordinary instance of Shelley's indebtedness to Keats, which has, so far as I know, escaped notice. It is in stanzas III–VI, VII–XI, XIV, XVII–XVIII, XXI–XXII, XXXI, XXXVIII, XLII, LIII, LV, LVIII of The Witch of Atlas. And in those stanzas Shelley has drawn upon all four books of Endymion, and twice, it would seem, upon Sleep and Poetry. That there are other similar instances is not improbable. But a bare statement of this group of facts must, for the moment, suffice.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , March 1940 , pp. 203 - 206
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1940

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References

1 What follows is not to be regarded as a study of “sources,” in the stock sense of that much abused word. It is that, only as it represents a striking, almost startling, instance of the impregnation of one poem with another, through the influence of a second and recent reading of Endymion, under the influence of stirred personal feeling.

2 Shelley may, indeed, have had the poems with him on the excursion, as he had them in his pocket on the voyage which ended in his death (Trelawny, Recollections, l, 2, 989). But that is not a necessary assumption.

3 The “Advertisement” of the volume of 1820, in which The Eve of St. Agnes appeared, is dated June 26, 1820 (Garrod, The Poetical Works of John Keats, 1939, p. [190]. See also a facsimile of the Advertisement in Amy Lowell, John Keats, ii, opposite p. 424. It is quite possible that Shelley may have seen Keats's volume before mid-August. The remaining parallels, however, are drawn from the volume of 1817.

4 The witch appears also in End. iii, 567, 620, 645. Stanzas vi–xi of WA. (like the account of the Triumph of Bacchus in End. iv, 193–272) depict a procession, and the details which follow make it clear that the passage was in Shelley's mind. “The sly serpent,” in vi. 3, is recalled from Milton, P.L. iv, 347: “the serpent sly,” and P.L. ix, 613: “the spirited sly Snake.”