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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
More than one critic has recalled the passage in Robertson's History of America which probably inspired the final simile of Keats's most famous sonnet. It was in September, 1513. Balboa and his men had been struggling for twenty days across the sixty miles of forest and mountain that made the isthmus of Darien, having been obliged to battle with the natives as well as with torrents, swamps, and precipices. Many of the men were sick and ready to give up.
1 H. Buxton Forman, The Complete Works of John Keats (1900), i, 46; E. de Selincourt, The Poems of John Keats, fifth edition (1926), p. 398. Also Sir Sidney Colvin and Amy Lowell in their lives of Keats.
2 History of America, i, 203–204.—All references are to the Dublin, 1777, edition.
2a Colvin's John Keats, p. 14.
3 This point has recently been made by Middleton Murry in a subtle essay. But he has not taken into account the dominant influence of Robertson except in the concluding simile. Mr. Murry's essay appears in the Bibbert Journal, xxvii, 93–110, and in the (American) Bookman, lxviii, 391–401.
4 Robertson, i, 48–49.
5 Ibid., i, 91–92.
6 Ibid., ii, 66–67.
7 Quoted by Amy Lowell in her John Keats (two volumes in one, Houghton Mifflin, 1929), i, 180.
8 “Some Notes on Keats,” Philological Quarterly, viii, 313–315.
9 Robertson, ii, 130.
10 “Keats's Approach to the Chapman Sonnet,” Essays and Studies of the English Association, xvi, 26–52.
11 Robertson, i, 52.
12 John Keats (1925), p. 88.
13 Robertson, i, 94.
14 Ibid., i, 96.
15 Ibid., i, 200.
16 Ibid., ii, 389.
