Keats’s Verse Epistles of 1817: Articulating Distress, Transience, and Visionary Voices

This article examines how Keats’s verse epistles, included in his earliest volume of 1817, Poems, establish his prominent themes and literary elements, and introduce insightful perspectives on humanity and the world. Keats’s critics have focused primarily on well-known poems in his first collection of poetry. This paper, however, contends that his underappreciated verse epistles, addressed to one individual, prefigure the recurrent motifs of the speaker’s inner distress which entails its interlinking concepts of transience and ambivalence. In addition, the power of imagination, which Keats demonstrates in his subsequent writings, reflects the literary contemplations and visionary perceptions which he exemplified in the 1817 poetic epistles. These verses ultimately convey the idea of how to embrace the internal discord entwined with the predicament and double-edged sides of humanities in the age of despondency. (Changwon National University)