Shelley’s Adonais and John Keats

Shelley’s elegy for Keats, Adonais, is set in the context of the acquaintance of the two poets, and in Shelley’s intellectual and poetic development up to 1821. His artistic decisions in determining the ornate ‘classical’ style of the poem, including the paratexts of its first published form, are understood as deliberately chosen to honour Keats, who had in Shelley’s understanding been killed by the effects of savage, politically motivated, attacks in the Tory Reviews. The essay then reveals the true extent and complexity of Shelley’s allusions to Keats’s poetry throughout Adonais, starting with its title as a Greek pun on ‘nightingale’, and covering references of many kinds to the whole range of Keats’s published output, including some of the most famous passages in Adonais.