Keats's Influence on Shelley

Ketas's Influence on Shelley, a talk by Prof. Kelvin Everest on Thursday 20th November at 5 pm

Keats and Shelley were never more than acquaintances, and were very different in their backgrounds and personalities. There is little evidence of Shelleyan influence on Keats’s poetry, and, for the main part of Shelley’s career, scant evidence of any Keatsian influence on Shelley. There are however signs that in the months before his death Shelley was changing both as a person and as a poet. He was immensely impressed by Keats’s achievement in the poems published in his 1820 collection. My talk identifies a new turn in Shelley’s poetry, and develops the possibility that he was influenced by Keats in moving towards a more mature and self-reflective lyrical style. In his final months Shelley wrote a series of poems to Jane Williams, the common-law wife of his close friend Edward Williams. These poems, kept secret from Mary Shelley, are considered in this context.

Admission is free but booking is required due to the limited number of spaces (please write to info@keats-shelley-house.org).

Entry from 4:45 pm onwards. 

Kelvin Everest is Emeritus AC Bradley Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Liverpool. He has held a Research Scholarship at St John's College Oxford, and is a Visiting Fellow Commoner of Trinity College Cambridge. Professor Everest has published books on Coleridge, Keats and Shelley, and numerous scholarly and critical articles and chapters. He has edited several collections of essays, and is the lead editor of the Longman Complete Poems of Shelley (6 volumes, 1989-2024). He has been awarded 'Distinguished Scholar of the Year 2025' by the Keats-Shelley Association of America, and has received (2025) the 'Outstanding Lifetime Achievement' award of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association.