Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology

Kim Blank’s Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology, a wide-ranging website dedicated to tracing the complex set of shaping forces behind Keats’s poetic development, is now in version 2.0. In addition to following Keats’s progress as poet, the site maps his life in London while also reimagining the form of the critical monograph and biography. Composed of 156 interconnected “micro-chapters,” the project’s hyperlinked structure aims to further open the insights of Keats’s writings to students and scholars alike.Along with rich commentaries detailing significant moments in Keats’s life, development, and reception, the site features over 700 images, including a gallery of depictions of Keats from early sketches to recent pop culture renditions; and a wealth of resources, among them a bibliography of biographies and editions of Keats’s letters and poetry, and a digital index of Keats’s complete poems.In Blank's own words of welcome:

An attempt is made to render at least one part or aspect of Keats’s whole story at almost every stop you’ll make, with the hope you will never be completely lost. Most of the chapters after 1815 offer context, commentary, and my critical views on Keats’s poetry and poetic development, with a deliberately measured amount of overlapping narrative and information. Thus the structure of the site—progressive reduplication, I call it—signals that it is fine to move consecutively or randomly, forwards or backwards—just to see how our dear poet is doing. In short, wandering is encouraged.

Following this encouragement to wander, here are a few excerpts that caught the attention of this communications fellow:

• 1797: Keats is two years old, and (according to Benjamin Robert Haydon) obsessed with rhyming; his brother George, later recipient of many important letters, is born—as is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Meanwhile, the Wordsworths move to Alfoxden; and in Paris, the first frameless parachute descends.
• 1811-1815: Keats apprentices as a surgeon with Thomas Hammond at 7 Church Street, Lower Edmonton, where a medical practice continued until the building was replaced in the 1930s. The site includes images of the location in the 1930s, provided by the Enfield Local Studies Library & Archive:

  

• January 21, 1818: “Keats, aged 22, sees his friend and early mentor, the poet, publisher, and journalist Leigh Hunt. Keats writes to his friend Benjamin Bailey (who is studying for holy orders at Oxford) that Hunt has a ‘real authenticated Lock of Milton’s Hair,’ and that Hunt has decided that, on this day, he and Keats should write poems about it.” Hunt’s “Book of Hair,” Blank’s footnote explains, is now held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, and features clippings from Keats, along with William Wordsworth, Robert Browning, and Percy Shelley. Here's the poem, and a section of the manuscript:

  

• And from the gallery, a first day issue stamp from 1971, marking the 150th anniversary of Keats's death:

  

You can read more about Mapping Keats's Progress here; or start exploring by taking a look at the site's index.