Egerton MS 2780

Poetry notebook by John Keats, partly autograph. Public Domain.

The volume contains the following -

• " The Pot, of'' Basil." Autogragh. (f. 1)
• "Ode" on the Mermaid tavern Autogr. (f. 29)
• "Song," beg. "Hence Burgundy, Claret, and Port." (f. 30)
• "Sint Agnes Eve." (ff. 31, 37)
• "The Eve of St. Mark." Autogr. (f. 33)
• " Ode oil Melancholy." (f. 52)
• " Ode to the Nightin gale."( f. 53)
• " Ode on a Grecian Urn." (f. 55)
• "Fragment," beg. " Welcome joy, and welcome sorrow." (f. 56)
• " Fra-ment," beg. " Where''s the Poet ?" (f. 57 b)
• " To Autumn." (f. 58)
• "To John Reynolds, in answer to his Sonnets on Robin Hood." (f. 59). Included also are the following poems written in honour of Keats, viz.:
• " Lines on seeing a Portrait of Keats,by the author of L''Improvisatore, L. E. Landon, 1824" copied from The Examiner. (f. 60b)
• The first three stanzas of Shelley''s " Adonais." (f. 61 b)
• Sonnet by Mrs. Norton, 1840, beg. " Like an enfranchised bird." (f. 62 b). Two inserted papers contain Keats'' lines beginning " There is a charm in footing slow" (f. 63), and some lines by " an unknown Bard" addressed " to Miss Keats of Louisville, Ky.," i.e. one of the daughters of George Keats (f. 64).

Printed copies of a " Sonnet on the death of the poet Weats," of the first four. lines of Keats'' " There is a charm in footing slow," and of a poem from Fraser''s Magazine entitled " One Daisy and two Violets (sent from the grave of Keats, Rome, 1880)", are pasted down on ff. 56, 58 b, 66.

Several pages have been torn out, before the volume was used to receive the poems. At the head of f. 1 is written the name of George Keats (apparently autograph) and the date 1820. In all probability this is the volume referred to by the poet in a letter of 14 Feb. 1819, to his brother George, then in America: " In my next packet I shall send you my ''Pot of Basil,'' ''St. Agnes Eve,'' arid, if I should have finished it, a little thing called ''The Eve of St. Mark."'' (Letters, ed. Colvin, 1891, p. 221.)

"St. Agnes Eve," as well is the other poems which are not in John Keats'' hand, must, however, have been sent separately, and they have been copied into this volume subsequently. It was previously believed that the poems were copied in by Georgiana Keats, Keats''s sister-in-law. Academics (including Jack Stillinger in The Texts of Keats''s Poems (1974)) now believe that the poems were transcribed by her husband George Keats instead. The same hand has affixed dates to all the poems. These copies were not made from the printed editions, since they contain variants which do not occur in the latter., but must presumably have been taken from the MS. copies which the poet was in the habit of sending in his letters to his brother and sister-in-law.

The volume passed from America to Australia, and was acquired in 1891 by Edward Jenks, Professor of Law in the University of Melbourne, who communicated a description of it to the Athenæum of 23 May, 1891. No other autograph copy of " The Pot of Basil " is extant, except a fragment containing a few stanzas only, from which it appears that the present copy is intermediate between the first draft and the final form in which it was printed. It contains three complete stanzas which were subsequently cancelled, and many minor variations. Some corrections (not autograph, but differing from the printed version and therefore probably taken from MS. copies) have been inserted in pencil on the blank pages facing the text. " The Eve of Saint Mark " is evidently the first draft of the poem, containing many cancelled lines and phrases, with the corrections which reduced it to the form in which it was published, after Keats'' death, from a copy found among his papers by Lord Houghton. The copy of " Saint Agnes'' Eve " is intermediate between the autograph copy in the possession of Mr. Locker-Lampson and the printed version. In the shorter poems the textual variations are less important. Paper; ff. 66. Bound in plain brown leather. Small Octavo.

Poetry: Sonnet and poems, by J. Keats: 1817, n.d.: Autogr.

John Keats, poet: Poems: 19th cent.: Partly autograph.