John Keats began writing poetry in 1814 and would publish his first book of collected poems three years later. But it was in 1818, with the publication of Endymion: A Poetic Romance, that Keats became more widely recognized for his verse, even if that recognition was not entirely positive. Keats regarded his 4,000-line verse romance Endymion as a creative experiment—a “Pioneer,” a “great trial of invention,” a “feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished.” Envisioning a literary career in the mold of Virgil, Dante, or Milton, he felt compelled to try his hand at writing a long poem, asking, in a letter to a friend, “Did our great Poets ever write short Pieces?”

Endymion follows the wanderings of its eponymous shepherd-hero, whose love for the moon goddess Cynthia takes him through sylvan dreamscapes, underground chambers, and the ocean’s “hollow vast.” The poem’s lush imagery, sometimes overwrought, conjures up a “mazy world / Of Silvery enchantment” (I.460–61), a realm of gentle rills and cloistered bowers. But as Keats himself admitted, the poem served as a testing ground for future literary endeavors: it was not his best work, but it presaged better things to come.

Inveterate in their dislike of progressive writers such as Leigh Hunt and Keats, Tory critics John Gibson Lockhart and John Wilson Croker wrote searing reviews of Endymion in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the Quarterly Review, attacking the poem’s politics as much as its literary merit. Lockhart characterized the poem’s enjambed lines and narrative digressions as indecorous and politically suspect, while Croker dismissed Endymion outright as “nonsense,” claiming he could read only the first of its four books. The infamous bad press hurled at Endymion created the myth of a thin-skinned Keats “snuffed out by an Article,” as Lord Byron quipped in his mock-epic poem Don Juan (1819–24). Though undoubtedly affected by these reviews, in reality Keats was resilient, persisted in his craft, and went on to write some of the most celebrated lyric poetry in English.

No early drafts of Endymion survive. The manuscript at the Morgan is for the most part a fair copy prepared for the printer, though it does bear some revision in Book I. The first page of the manuscript, includes a line and a half deleted by Keats before the poem went to press—a line referencing King Arthur (“and before us dances / Like glitter on the points of Arthur’s lances”).

The origin of Belle Greene’s interest in John Keats is obscure. Though we know she enjoyed reading poetry—especially Shelley, Keats, Dante, and Baudelaire—it is unclear whether her taste in literature was cultivated in childhood by her father, the educator and activist Richard T. Greener (1844–1922), or later in life. Extant archives offer tantalizing glimpses of Greene’s interest in Keats, though many questions remain: what were her favorite Keats poems, for instance?

By 1909, a few years after starting her position as J. Pierpont Morgan’s Librarian, Greene was actively purchasing Keats manuscripts for the collection. Her first documented acquisition of a Keats manuscript is a lengthy journal-letter sent by Keats in September 1819 to his brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana, both of whom had been living in America since the summer of 1818. Keats customarily sent them long, descriptive letters like this one, composed over the course of ten days; these letters touched upon his life and work and sometimes included copies of his poetry. Greene acquired the letter at the 1909 auction of Louis J. Haber’s British literature collection, with the bookselling firm George H. Richmond acting as her agent. A.J. Bowden, an employee at the firm, described the twenty-eight page manuscript as “the best thing of its kind ever offered.”

Belle Greene’s most important early Keats acquisition came in 1912, when she procured a letter written by Keats in February 1818 to his publisher John Taylor (1781–1864). Frank Wheeler of J. Pearson & Co., the same dealer who sold the Endymion manuscript, offered the letter to Greene, as described in a letter to J. Pierpont Morgan:

“Last month I sent Miss Greene an advance copy of a printed (and priced) list of Books and Manuscripts of superlative importance which I had been lucky enough to purchase privately … Miss Greene has made her selection— inter alia, a superb letter of Keats about the publication of Endymion— the finest Poet’s letter that I’ve ever seen.”

The acquisition shows Greene’s discerning eye for collection development, as the letter, sent to Keats’s publisher John Taylor, contextualizes the publication of Endymion in interesting ways. Keats responds to editorial queries about punctuation and proof corrections while also commenting more generally on the role of the poem in his fledgling career. As Keats writes, using a rather obscure metaphor, “In Endymion I have most likely but moved into the Go-cart from the leading strings.” (A “go-cart” is a walker for babies and would have marked a progression from “leading strings,” also used to aid small children learning to walk.)

Most notably, the letter outlines Keats’s three “Axioms” for poetry:

1^st I think ^Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by Singularity— it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance—

2^nd Its touches of Beauty should never be half way thereby making the reader breathless instead of content: the use, the progress, the setting of imagery should like the sun come natural [,] natural too [sic] him—shine over him and set soberly although in magnificence leaving him in the luxury of twilight. but it is easier to think what Poetry should be than to write it —

[3^rd] and this leads me on to another axiom. That if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.

This famous commentary on poetics exists in the absence of any formal work by Keats on literary theory or criticism: unlike Coleridge, with his Biographia Literaria (1817), or Wordsworth, with his “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads (1800), Keats did not publish works of literary criticism but rather expressed such ideas in private letters.

The first of the axioms, from which this exhibition takes its title, speaks to the authenticity of imaginative expression, which seems to approximate a reader’s own thoughts and resemble a deeply held memory. The notion of poetry “surpris [ing] by a fine excess” complements the second axiom’s focus on how a writer should deploy imagery and “its touches of Beauty.” The third and final axiom is certainly the most famous, though Keats undercuts its impact by admitting, at the end of axiom two, that “it is easier to think what Poetry should be than to write it.”

In 1819, two years before his death at age twenty-five, Keats wrote his best-known poems in an extraordinary burst of creative activity. He would complete five of his six so-called great odes in the spring of 1819—“Ode to Psyche,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on Indolence,” and “Ode on Melancholy”—and compose the sixth, “To Autumn,” that fall. Along with other celebrated poems he wrote that year, including “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “Lamia,” and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” the great odes would prove, in time, to secure literary immortality for Keats.

The Morgan owns the original draft of the first of these odes, completed in late April 1819. Though “Ode to Psyche” would shape the stanzaic form used in the rest of the great odes, it seems adding “Ode” to the title was somewhat of an afterthought; looking closely at the manuscript, one can see that “Ode” was written later, and slightly off to the side, of “To Psyche.” Keats recounted the composition of “Psyche” in a letter to his brother:

“it is the first and only one [i.e., poem] with which I have taken even moderate pains—I have for the most part dash’d of[f] my lines in a hurry— This I have done leisurely—I think it reads the more richly for it and will I hope encourage me to write other thing[s] in even a more peaceable and healthy spirit.”

The poem draws on the myth of Cupid and Psyche, first imagined in the second-century Metamorphoses of Apuleius and most recently (for Keats) portrayed in verse by Mary Tighe’s Psyche; or, the Legend of Love (1805). Keats knew the myth of Cupid and Psyche primarily from John Lemprière’s Bibliotheca Classica (1788), which summarizes the main elements of the story: “PSYCHE, a nymph whom Cupid married and carried into a place of bliss, where he long enjoyed her company. Venus put her to death because she had robbed the world of her son; but Jupiter, at the request of Cupid, granted immortality to Psyche.”

The speaker of “Ode to Psyche” addresses the goddess as the “latest born” of ancient deities,

Fairer than these though Temple thou hast none,
Nor Altar heap’d with flowers;
Nor Virgin Choir to make melodious moan
Upon the midnight hours.

After witnessing Cupid and Psyche “couched side by side, / In deepest grass, beneath the whispering fan / Of leaves and trembled blossoms,” the speaker resolves to devote himself to the goddess as her priest, her “pale-mouth’d Prophet dreaming”:

Yes, I will be thy Priest and build a Fane
In some untrodden Region of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain
Instead of Pines shall murmur in the wind.

The poem goes on to envision a temple of the imagination—“a rosy sanctuary . . . dress[ed] / With the wreathed trellis of a working brain”—built to exalt the goddess, whose name in Greek means “soul.” The striking image of the brain as a “wreathed trellis” draws its inspiration from Keats’s first career, in medicine; his 1815–16 stint as a medical student at Guy’s Hospital in Southwark exposed him to the anatomical secrets of the human body, if also traumatizing him with the potentially horrifying spectacle of pre-modern surgery.

In the autumn of 1817 Keats’s younger brother Tom became seriously ill with tuberculosis—the disease that claimed their mother’s life in 1810—and rapidly declined in health over the course of the ensuing year. After returning to England in the summer of 1818 from a walking tour of Scotland, Keats, who himself had contracted a bad sore throat while traveling, stayed by Tom’s side during his final months. He would die in December. Though Keats’s own health would not deteriorate significantly for another year, his period of close contact with Tom coupled with the sore throat would prove to be a fateful combination.

By 1820 Keats’s tuberculosis had become so severe that his doctors advised a change in climate. During the poet’s final days, spent in Rome at a house on the Piazza di Spagna, the English artist Joseph Severn (1793–1879) remained by his side. Severn sketched a famously moving deathbed portrait of Keats on 28 January 1821, with the inscription “3 o’clock [in the] morning—drawn to keep me awake[,] a deadly sweat was on him all this night.” In 1825 Severn sent this copy of the original sketch (held at the Keats-Shelley House, Rome) to Keats’s publisher John Taylor, also enclosing a letter and a lock of the poet’s hair. This collection of Keats relics, including the paper packet that once housed the lock of hair, arrived at the Morgan in 1909 as a purchase from the bookseller Frank T. Sabin. This purchase included significant Percy Bysshe Shelley manuscripts (including a poem found in his pocket after he drowned in 1822) and one additional lock of Keats’s hair, cut just before he left England for Italy. The Morgan also owns a third lock, taken by William Haslam and later in the possession of Joseph Severn.

According to the covering letter, this deathbed sketch is the original drawing Severn made “from life” as he nursed Keats in Rome. As Severn writes, “I take this first opportunity of sending to you a little sketch of our dear friend Keats, the only one I have done from the life — I remember you told me in your last letter that you ‘would prefer any thing done from the life, to a mere copy’.” This statement seems to support the idea that the Morgan version of the sketch is the original, though scholarly consensus maintains that the version at the Keats-Shelley House in Rome, donated by Severn’s daughter Eleanor Furneaux, came first. The sketch has endured as the best-known image of the poet.

Keats died on 23 February and was buried in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery, his grave marker bearing the epitaph “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.” Severn would be buried next to him.

In 1912 Belle Greene compiled a typescript research guide to the Morgan’s Keats collection. The list includes most of the objects discussed in this exhibition, including the Severn sketch and lock of Keats’s hair. Greene described her project in a letter to the art historian Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), her romantic partner, friend, and colleague: “I am working pretty hard on a Keats bibliography for a book which is being prepared in London—of course my name will not appear at all but I am anxious to give all the information I can.” Greene drafted the list for Sidney Colvin (1845–1927), who was writing a new, comprehensive biography of Keats, published in 1917 as John Keats, his Life and Poetry, his Friends, Critics and After-Fame. Though Colvin does thank Greene briefly in his acknowledgments, her words stand as a reminder that scholarship is often advanced by the largely uncredited efforts of librarians.

Greene’s letters to Berenson are preserved at I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. The letters frequently reference Greene’s work at the Morgan, recounting acquisitions, describing collection research, and tracing her extensive professional networks. Another of these letters even touches upon her love of Keats’s poetry. Writing on 22 September 1911, Greene reminisces about her time spent with Berenson at Claridge’s Hotel, London: “you remember the Evening at Claridge’s when you read Keats + Shelley + French verses to me—I think of it—that evening—Every time I read any Baudelaire.” Another romantic interest of Greene’s, the publisher and gallery owner Mitchell Kennerly (1878–1950), also read Keats and Shelley to her, as recounted in a May 1914 letter to Berenson. A team at the Morgan is currently transcribing the entire archive of letters (616 in total) that Greene wrote to Berenson and has plans to make the images and transcriptions freely available online.

Soon after Keats’s death, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote what is arguably the most famous literary elegy in English. Yet Adonais has done much to distort its subject’s reputation, characterizing Keats as exceedingly weak and fragile—as a “nursling,” a “gentle child,” a “pale flower” withered by bad reviews. Shelley reinforced these notions in his preface to Adonais, where he attributes Keats’s death to negative press directed at Endymion:

The savage criticism on his Endymion, which appeared in the Quarterly Review, produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind; the agitation thus originated ended in the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs; a rapid consumption ensued, and the succeeding acknowledgments from more candid critics, of the true greatness of his powers, were ineffectual to heal the wound thus wantonly inflicted.

Shelley gave this copy of Adonais to Keats’s deathbed companion, Joseph Severn, as recorded in a handwritten note on the title page: “J. Severn— Rome 1821 given [to] me by Shelley shortly before his death.” Severn marked several passages in the volume, including those that imagine fellow poets Lord Byron (“The Pilgrim of Eternity”) and Shelley (“a pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift”) mourning Keats. Another marked passage draws attention to the critics allegedly responsible for Keats’s decline, here figured as “herded wolves” and “obscene ravens, clamorous o’er the dead.”

The Morgan additionally owns the letter Shelley sent Severn to accompany the volume. Undoubtedly with a dose of affected modesty, Shelley characterizes his “Elegy on poor Keats” as deficient, written “before [he] could attain any particular account of his [i.e., Keats’s] last moments.” He continues with a well-known pronouncement on the literary reputation of Keats; according to Shelley, neither poet will ever become popular:

In spite of his transcendent genius Keats never was nor ever will be a popular poet, & the total neglect & obscurity in which the astonishing remnants of his mind still lie, was hardly to be dissipated by a writer, who, however he may differ from Keats in more important qualities, at least resembles him in that accidental one, a want of popularity.

Shelley also speaks to a nascent interest in Keats’s literary remains, “the remnants of his compositions”: “Has he left any poems or writings of whatever kind, & in whose possession are they?” Despite Shelley’s prediction that Keats’s work will languish in “total neglect & obscurity,” interest in his life and poetry would only increase over the nineteenth century, culminating in the first major scholarly work on the poet, Richard Monckton Milnes’s Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848).

After J. Pierpont Morgan’s death in 1913, Greene continued to make major acquisitions on behalf of his son and heir, J. P. Morgan, Jr. In the summer of 1915 she purchased two important Keats items from the Philadelphia bookseller A. S. W. Rosenbach (1876–1952): an early manuscript of Keats’s sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and the copy of Shelley’s Adonais given to Joseph Severn. The surviving invoice shows that she paid $15,000 for these two items as well a copy of Shelley’s Zastrozzi.

“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” is the most celebrated of Keats’s early poems, composed and published in the fall of 1816. The story goes that Keats and his friend Charles Cowden Clarke (1787–1877) stayed up all night reading George Chapman’s translation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (1616). The next morning Keats rapidly composed a sonnet on his transformative reading experience, likening it to the discovery of new planets or Europeans’ first glimpse at the Pacific Ocean’s eastern shore. After finishing the poem he promptly sent it back to Clarke, who was able to read it while eating breakfast.

Though scholars have long thought that the manuscript preserved at Harvard University’s Houghton Library is the original sent to Clarke, recent work has convincingly shown that the Harvard manuscript was sent instead to Joseph Severn; the original manuscript sent to Clarke, it seems, is now lost. The Morgan manuscript of “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” is in Keats’s hand and was given to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds (1794–1852), who later inscribed it to his sister, “To Mariane Reynolds.” We can date the text of the Morgan manuscript as later than the Harvard copy, but earlier than the authoritative version published in Keats’s 1817 Poems. The Morgan manuscript’s “Yet could I never judge what Men could mean” in line 7 would become “Yet never did I breathe its pure serene” in the 1817 Poems, while the Harvard manuscript’s “wond’ring eyes” becomes “eagle eyes” in the Morgan copy (and “eagle eyes” would remain in later versions).

Before leaving for Italy in 1820, Keats made arrangements “in case of [his] death” and sent this unofficial will to his publisher John Taylor:

My Chest of Books divide among my friends.
In case of my death this scrap of Paper
may be servicable [sic] in your possession.

All my estate real and personal consists
in the hopes of the sale of books publish’d or
unpublish’d. Now I wish Brown and
you to be the first paid Creditors—the
rest is in nubilus—but in case it
should shower pay my Taylor the
few pounds I owe him.

Though owed an inheritance unfairly withheld for years, at the end of his life Keats was afflicted by poverty, with only a small library and “the hopes of the sale of books” to his name. Written in iambic pentameter, “My chest of books divide among my friends” would prove to be his last line of verse.

To help execute the will’s terms, his former roommate and sometime traveling companion Charles Armitage Brown drafted a catalogue of Keats’s library and the names of friends who had lent or given books to the poet. The list includes volumes of Keats’s favorite writers—Dante, Spenser, and Shakespeare—along with literary works by Wordsworth, Tasso, Petrarch, Chaucer, Bacon, Erasmus, Rabelais, and Ben Jonson, as well as standard classical texts like Horace and Terence along with outliers such as “Fencing Familiarized.” (Keats, however, was known for his pugnacity as a young man and enjoyed boxing.) His multi-volume sets of Shakespeare and Spenser—missing their sixth and final five volumes, respectively—are preserved at the Houghton Library of Harvard University.

The list is bound within a volume of letters, transcriptions, and documents compiled by Richard Woodhouse (1788–1834), a lawyer who worked with Keats’s publisher John Taylor and helped edit his poems for print. Woodhouse was also the first Keats collector, not only gathering letters and documents written by friends of the poet but also assembling literary manuscripts and transcribing his poems, in some cases from now-lost original sources. The Woodhouse collection at the Morgan includes copies of several well-known Keats poems, including “Day is gone, and all its sweets are gone” and “Isabella: or, the Pot of Basil,” which is transcribed in shorthand.

In February 1921, the Boston poet Amy Lowell (1874–1925)—Greene’s friend and the preeminent American collector of Keatsiana—was due to give a talk at Yale to mark the centenary of Keats’s death. In preparation for her talk, she contacted Belle Greene on February 3 to arrange a visit to the Library, where she wished to consult “not only the ‘Endymion’ etc., but the communication from Woodhouse to Taylor, and things of that sort.” At the time Lowell was working on a major new biography of John Keats, which for the first time drew prominently on manuscript material in American collections, primarily her own and Morgan’s. (Lowell would leave her collection to Harvard, which now holds the largest collection of Keats manuscripts in the world.) Though Sidney Colvin had briefly touched upon items at the Morgan for his 1917 Keats biography, Amy Lowell would be the first scholar to seriously study this material. Her knowledge of the collection’s depth—which, as she recognized, extended well beyond the famous Endymion manuscript—is emblematic of her meticulous research into archival sources about Keats.

Greene became the Morgan’s first director in 1924, when J. P. Morgan, Jr., established the library as a public institution. Before the Morgan’s gallery space was completed in 1926, Greene and her staff mounted exhibitions at the New York Public Library, for whom Mr. Morgan served as a trustee and Vice President. Following a successful NYPL exhibition of the Morgan’s American historical manuscripts in the spring of 1924, Original Manuscripts and Drawings of English Authors from the Pierpont Morgan Library opened in December 1924 and closed the following April, attracting around 180,000 visitors to see over 300 collection items—at the time the largest exhibition of manuscripts in American history. Belle Greene put on view twenty-seven objects by or related to Keats, one of the best-represented authors on display, and included nearly every Keats artifact from the present exhibition. A catalogue of the exhibition was printed privately but also reprinted in the New York Library Bulletin of March 1925.

Nothing but paper passed along with the breath
of its words alive with fire. Scraps of paper,
scraps of words written in fire.

—Stanley Plumly, Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography (2008), p. 364.

Stanley Plumly’s meditation on the ephemerality of Keats’s poetry manuscripts—their miraculous survival in the face of oblivion—speaks to a theme of profound relevance to the story of Belle Greene’s Keats. Going back to the February 1818 letter and Keats’s first poetic axiom—“poetry … should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance”—it is vital to stress the almost in “almost a remembrance.” On one hand it captures the idea of poetry as authentic imaginative expression. But the word equally signals a partial remembering, a half memory, and this idea is borne out in the extant archives, riddled with gaps, that we must rely on to tell the stories of Keats and Greene.

Despite the extensive literary manuscripts and letters that survive, Keats destroyed or neglected his papers, much of which are extant because friends took the pains to preserve or transcribe them. It is well known that the letters he received from his fiancée Fanny Brawne are buried with him in Rome. Belle da Costa Greene famously burned her personal papers at the end of her life and is even more elusive in the archive than Keats. Yet these gaps have a presence; they leave traces of writing alluded to but no longer with us. As “scraps of words written in fire,” these archival lacunae haunt the story of Belle Greene and John Keats while at once contributing to their respective mythologies.

The scraps of paper on display in this exhibition trace an activity typically invisible to museum visitors, namely the work of librarians and archivists, as exemplified by the career of Belle da Costa Greene. The exhibition’s physical location in the museum is significant in that regard, as the Rotunda is positioned mere steps away from Belle da Costa Greene’s former office in the North Room of J. Pierpont Morgan’s Library. It is there where she wrote her correspondence with bookdealers, planned the English literature exhibition at NYPL, met with Amy Lowell, and drafted the first research guide to the Morgan’s Keats manuscripts.

Re-positioning Greene in multiple spaces of the library, and in multiple stories about the library, will continue to be a major emphasis as we move toward 2024, when the Morgan will mount a major exhibition on Belle da Costa Greene to celebrate its centenary as a public institution.

Many thanks to colleagues at the Morgan Library & Museum who have contributed their expertise to make this physical and digital exhibition possible, especially Christine Nelson, Sal Robinson, Marilyn Palmeri, Graham Haber, Janny Chiu, Reba Fishman Snyder, Frank Trujillo, Ian Umlauf, Emily Quint-Hoover, Joelle Seligson, Daria Rose Foner, Sheelagh Bevan, John Alexander, Keith Johnson, and Sholto Ainslie.

Special thanks to Ilaria Della Monica and Michael Rocke of Villa I Tatti for granting permission to use images from the Bernard and Mary Berenson Papers.

I am also grateful to the scholars and curators who have written on John Keats and Belle da Costa Greene, including Heidi Ardizzone, Jean Strouse, Aileen Ward, Andrew Motion, Stanley Plumly, Grant F. Scott, Susan J. Wolfson, Margaret Homans, John Barnard, Stephen Hebron, Robert Gittings, Jack Stillinger, James L. Weil, Flaminia Gennari-Santori, Hyder Edward Rollins, Sidney Colvin, and Amy Lowell.

Lastly, I would like to extend my deep admiration for the work and legacy of Belle da Costa Greene, whose expertise and dedication made the Morgan’s Keats collection, indeed the Morgan as a whole, what it is today.

–Philip S. Palmer, Robert H. Taylor Curator and Department Head, Literary and Historical Manuscripts

Photography of Morgan Library & Museum objects by Graham Haber and Janny Chiu

Photographs of Belle Greene letters to Bernard Berenson, Biblioteca Berenson, I Tatti - The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, courtesy of the President and Fellows of Harvard College