Appendix A. Dickinson and Keats: Some Notes on Influence and Affinity

In the Annotated Bibliography of his book, Emily Dickinson's Reading (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1966) Jack Capps quotes the Ode on a Grecian Urn in relation to “I died for Beauty—” (P449). But in fact there are many literal echoes of Keats' work in her words, such as I give below (a), as well as areas where their ideas seem to have touched rather specifically (b), either by chance and the spirit of the age or because she may have read Keats' work and letters. Ruth Miller's Appendix III: “Emily Dickinson's Reading”, in her 1968 study (Miller), does not give any volume of Keats' work as present in the Dickinson household library. In Joanne Feit Diehl's comparison of Dickinson and Keats in Dickinson & the Romantic Imagination she mentions that the Dickinson family certainly owned two anthologies of poems containing some of Keats', and the Northampton Library had an 1848 edition of R. Monckton Milnes' Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848). As is well known, Keats was one of the few writers she named as among “[her] Books” in the famous L261 to Higginson.