Keats Meets Coleridge

Abstract

Keats and Coleridge met for the one and only time on 11 April 1819. That accidental meeting embodied a range of circumstances and contexts which converged to create the conditions in which Keats’s poetic career advanced beyond its initial rapid development. Brief but intense exposure to Coleridge’s unceasingly philosophical turn of mind, as the two poets walked on Hampstead Heath, precipitated a newly self-conscious address on Keats’s part to the power of metaphor to express the mind’s activity in perception and artistic creation. This produced in the ‘Ode to Psyche’ a new level of intellectual sophistication, and a pathway to the achievement of the major Spring Odes which immediately followed.