To Autumn

The poem was composed on 19 September 1819 and published in 1820 in a volume of Keats’s poetry that included Lamia and The Eve of St. Agnes. It has been interpreted as a meditation on death; as an allegory of artistic creation; as a response to the Peterloo Massacre, which took place in the same year; and as an expression of nationalist sentiment.

About To Autumn in brief

\”To Autumn\” is a poem by English Romantic poet John Keats. The work was composed on 19 September 1819 and published in 1820 in a volume of Keats’s poetry that included Lamia and The Eve of St. Agnes. The poem has three eleven-line stanzas which describe a progression through the season, from the late maturation of the crops to the harvest and to the last days of autumn when winter is nearing. It has been interpreted as a meditation on death; as an allegory of artistic creation; as a response to the Peterloo Massacre, which took place in the same year; and as an expression of nationalist sentiment. A little over a year after the publication of \”To Autumn\”, Keats died in Rome. The poem was revised and included in Keats’s 1820 collection of poetry titled Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of  St. Agnes, and Other Poems. Keats did not send the poem to his publisher Richard Woodhouse, but did include it within a letter to his friend, his friend and publisher John Hamilton Reynolds, on the same day and day as the poem was published. In a letter that he wrote to Reynolds, Keats also included a note saying that he abandoned his long poem. The poet knew in September that he would have to finally abandon Hyperion. He began working on more lucrative projects, such as the verse tragedy Otho the Great in collaboration with friend and roommate Charles Brown, and the second half of Lamia.

In his free time he also read works as varied as Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, Thomas Chatterton’s poetry, and Leigh Hunt’s essays. In the spring of 1819, he wrote many of his major odes: \”Ode on a Grecian Urn\”, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, and “Ode of Psyche’. His efforts from spring until autumn were dedicated completely to a career in poetry, alternating between writing long and short poems, and setting himself a goal to compose more than fifty lines of verse each day. Although Keats managed to write many poems in 1819 he was suffering from a multitude of financial troubles throughout the year, including concerns over his brother, George, who, after emigrating to America, was badly in need of money. Despite these distractions, he found time to write “To Autumn’”. The poem marks the final moment of his career as a poet, as he needed to earn money and could no longer devote himself to the lifestyle of a poet. It has parallels in the work of English landscape artists, with Keats himself describing the fields of stubble that he saw on his walk as conveying the warmth of ‘some pictures’ in the poem. It is regarded by critics as one of the most perfect short poems in the English language.

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