Uncovering the Archive - Keats’ Paradise Lost: A Digital Edition, The Keats Library and Keats House
Although the Romantic poets lived two hundred years ago, a remarkable number of their manuscripts, belongings, and other assorted ephemera still survive and are preserved in archives and collections across the globe. Most of the time, these artefacts are tucked away in museum collections, or specially stored in boxes to preserve the delicate paper or materials used to make them. Generally only a select few are allowed access to these items, predominantly the archivists and custodians of these wonderful remnants and the researchers who are lucky enough to be working on them. Therefore, the aim of this exciting series on the K-SAA Blog is to bring to the fore the hidden and hidden-in-plain-sight artefacts of the Romantic poets, particularly those belonging to the Shelleys, Keats, Byron and their circles. We also aim to provide you, the reader, with behind-the-scenes access to these collections, along with insider knowledge from archivists and scholars.
For this special instalment of our 'Uncovering the Archive' series, we were lucky enough to be able to interview Professor Beth Lau and Dr Daniel Johnson, to get an insight into their new online resource, The Keats Library. We also discussed the first digital edition published as part of this project, Keats' edition of John Milton's Paradise Lost. Read on to find out more about this unique and ground-breaking project.
What are the aims of The Keats Library?
Beth Lau (BL): The Keats Library aims to make available in digital format all of Keats’s extant annotated books. Our first goal is to include books not currently available online (Harvard’s Houghton Library has digitized some of Keats’s books from their important collection, though in simple page scans without any search features or editorial apparatus). Besides Harvard, the other major repository of Keats’s surviving books is Keats House in Hampstead, UK, which has no plans to digitize any of these volumes. We secured an agreement with Keats House to create our digital edition of Keats’s two-volume copy of Paradise Lost, and we hope to continue working with that institution to add further Keats books to our website. Among the most valuable annotated books at Keats House are Keats’s folio edition of Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies; Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy; and The Poetical Works of William Shakespeare. Eventually, we hope to expand The Keats Library site to include Keats books housed at other libraries (including Yale’s Beinecke Library, the New York Public Library, the British Library, the Huntington Library, and the Puke Ariki Library in New Zealand). Finally, we will explore with Harvard’s Houghton Library the possibility of creating digital editions of Keats books in their collection or at least providing links to these works on their website. The Keats Library will then be a resource for viewing all of the known extant books Keats owned and annotated.
Why was Keats’ edition of Paradise Lost the first book chosen to be published?
BL: A case can be made that Keats’s copy of Paradise Lost is the most important of his surviving annotated books. Other books that contain Keats’s marginalia (including editions of Shakespeare, Dante, Spenser, Chaucer, and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy) are annotated only in certain sections while others are left blank (or volumes in a set are missing), or they include other people’s markings in addition to Keats’s. Keats’s copy of Paradise Lost, however, is extensively marked and annotated throughout solely in Keats’s hand. The Paradise Lost marginalia were recognized as valuable even in Keats’s lifetime, for his brother George copied eleven of the nineteen notes onto the flyleaf of his own edition of Milton’s poem, and Mariane Reynolds went to the trouble of reproducing not only the notes but all of Keats’s markings into her personal copy of Paradise Lost. The notes were the first examples of Keats’s marginalia to be published (in 1843), and they have been included in a number of recent editions of Keats’s poetry (eg., by John Barnard, Elizabeth Cook, and Susan J. Wolfson), indicating the value they have for scholars and students. Keats’s extensive markings, consisting of underlining (single, double, and triple) as well as vertical lines in the margin (also ranging from single, double, to triple lines, indicating varying degrees of intensity in response to a passage), may be even more significant than the nineteen notes for conveying Keats’s line-by-line experience of reading Milton’s poem. Milton was a central figure for nearly all Romantic writers, including Keats. The poet’s richly annotated copy of Paradise Lost provides a valuable source of evidence for how he responded to this key text and for his reading practices and aesthetic principles generally.
What is unique about this digital edition?
Daniel Johnson (DJ): Previously, the reader interested in Keats’s Paradise Lost might hold Beth’s book in one hand, a separate copy of Paradise Lost in another hand for the context of the Milton passages the press couldn’t afford to print, and then be required to use a “third hand” to flip back and forth to the end notes. The medium imposed considerable constraints on study. We wanted to build an edition that would get out of the reader’s way, coordinating page scans, transcription of the whole poem, notes, and multiple modes of navigation all in one interface. But building the site’s simplicity took more technical planning than might at first be apparent. To give just one example, our underlying encoding technology, TEI XML, cannot process overlapping hierarchies, but overlap of technical elements is exactly what you face when you combine lines of poetry with an annotator’s heavy underscoring. In the end, then, we developed an edition that is not only easy to use on the front end, but also bears witness to considerable thinking on the back end. Our methods, written up in freely available technical documentation, make an implicit argument for how to encode annotated works of literature. They also open the edition to additional kinds of computational analysis, such as lists of single- versus double-underlined passages, or density maps of markup across the Paradise Lost, and so forth. Such analysis might be overkill for a single edition, but could make for fascinating insight at scale, either with the addition of new books annotated by Keats (what patterns of marking did he exhibit across his library?) or by placing Keats in conversation with other annotators of Milton. I should add that the use of open technologies means readers can download the underlying source TEI file or an html rendering of the whole transcription (with notes included) to consult offline should the web site ever go down. This combination of robust interface, experimentation with method, and long-term preservability is, I think, fairly rare if not unique (but hopefully becoming less rare, for the sake of the field).
What is so important about Paradise Lost for Keats’ poetic development or reading habits?
BL: Evidence indicates that Keats began his serious study of Milton, reading and annotating his two-volume edition of Paradise Lost, in the winter and spring of 1818. At this time, Keats had recently finished Endymion, with which he was not satisfied, and he was eager to strike out in new directions. Most scholars consider this a significant period in Keats’s development, marking a transition from the early work published in his first two volumes (Poems of 1817 and Endymion) toward the poetry for which he is best known, composed in late 1818 and throughout 1819. Benjamin Bailey told Richard Monckton Milnes in 1849 that he had urged Keats to read Paradise Lost when the latter visited him at Oxford in September 1817, and he claimed that the poet’s “subsequent study of Milton gave his mind a mighty addition of energy & manly vigour, which stand out so nobly in Hyperion” (Keats Circle 2: 283). Whether or not one concurs with Bailey’s characterization of Milton’s effect on Keats’s style, scholars generally agree that Paradise Lost had a profound influence on ideas, motifs, and techniques in Keats’s subsequent poetry and that his close reading of Milton’s epic poem was one of the factors that contributed to his extraordinary development in the remaining few years of his creative life. This is true even in the ways that Keats eventually pushed back against Milton’s example, defining his own aesthetic principles in opposition to the Puritan poet’s, as when he declared in September 1819, “I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to him would be death to me” (Letters 2: 212). Paradise Lost is one of the major works of English literature that contributed to Keats’s education and identity as a poet, both in terms of what he absorbed and adopted from the poem and what he resisted and rejected.
What sense of Keats as a poet and reader do the annotations in the text show?
BL: This question could be “pursued through Volumes” (Keats, Letters 1: 194), but for a condensed response I will quote from the summary in my Keats’s Paradise Lost book of major themes and patterns I identified in the marginalia: one finds “an emphasis on descriptive passages . . . an appreciation of the way in which obscurity or uncertainty stimulates the imagination; an interest in female decorum and solitude; a tension between the appeal of disciplined ambition and the pull of luxury and ease; a general fascination with contrasts; and a sensitivity to the pathos of change, suffering, and separation from loved ones and familiar surroundings” (36).
What is the most interesting annotation of Keats’ that you found within the text?
BL: I think what interested me most was not one of Keats’s notes but a pattern in his marking (underscoring and vertical lines in the margin), indicating which passages interested him and which did not. Keats seldom marks characters’ speeches in the poem. He heavily marks descriptions of setting and of characters’ appearances and actions, but he typically stops marking when Adam, Eve, Satan, or other characters begin to speak. Keats seems more interested in what characters convey through their appearances, gestures, and posture than their words. I am also intrigued by instances when Keats marks just one or two words, such as “noise” in Paradise Lost 2.957 and “Sole Eve” in 9.227.
What is the most exciting thing about this digital edition from an editor’s point of view?
DJ: Having full control of the look and feel of the “page,” unconstrained by publisher limitations or even the limitations of paper, is definitely an enticement. From a more technical point of view, two factors stick out. One: building a model to accommodate Keats’s system of marking is exciting, because it contributes to the development of editorial practices that could, one day, make editions across projects more interoperable. Or, perhaps someone else will develop a better system still — because we used a consistent model, if our “argument” about encoding fails, we can convert to the new standards. Two: building for sustainability is always exciting. Elyse Graham’s article, “Joyce and the Graveyard of Digital Empires,” speaks to the peril of conducting editorial work in the digital realm, where many editions depend on a raft of fragile technologies, the demise of any of which could sink the work into oblivion. A physical book, we can reasonably assume, will still be found on a shelf somewhere in 20, 50, or 250 years. If we wish for digital editions to be taken up and cited, scholars will need the assurance of a similar degree of longevity. I figured that if people could save and open our work from their own hard drives, even if the page-turn interface wouldn’t survive the translation, that would be a major step in the right direction. Citing our edition? Copy the transcription and the TEI source file into the same folder as your scholarship’s Word files.
What is next for The Keats Library?
BL: The next book we will add to the site is probably Keats’s 1808 reprint of the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays, which contains Keats’s marginalia in Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, A Mid Summer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Henry V, Part I. The book also contains holograph versions of “On Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair” and “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again.”
Anything else you’d like to add?
DJ: An opportunity and a challenge of digital editions is that the work might never end. We conducted considerable testing before releasing the official version, but you’ll notice we identify it as “1.0.0” — a deliberate evocation of a software versioning paradigm. That means we can make corrections and keep track of the record of changes. We therefore encourage users of our site both to notify us of any errors for correction (email is fine; links to our faculty pages are listed under the website’s introduction) and to include the current version when they cite the edition in their scholarship.
Check out The Keats Library's digital edition of Paradise Lost here, alongside detailed apparatus relating to the text.
Beth Lau is Professor of English Emerita at California State University, Long Beach, who now lives in Bloomington, IN. She has published numerous works on Keats and other Romantic writers and has a particular interest in Keats’s reading and marginalia. In 1998 she published Keats’s Paradise Lost, which provides a print transcription of all of Keats’s notes and markings in his copy of Milton’s poem, along with analysis of this material. She drew on this research to write the scholarly introduction and editorial notes for Keats’s Paradise Lost: A Digital Edition.
Daniel Johnson is English, Digital Humanities, and Film/Television/Theatre Librarian at the University of Notre Dame. He holds a PhD in eighteenth-century literature, and has published on eighteenth-century novelists, digital humanities, and encoding labouring-class poetry. He drew on his experience with TEI to develop the technical infrastructure for Keats's Paradise Lost: a Digital Edition.