SOURCE: Olney, Clarke. “John Keats and Benjamin Robert Haydon.” PMLA 49, no. 1 (March 1934): 258-75.

In the following essay, Olney discusses Haydon's influence on the young John Keats during the mid-1810s, when the two men shared an intense devotion to art. Haydon encouraged Keats to undertake themes considered by Olney to be more “grand” and “powerful” than the poet's earlier subjects.

The friendship between John Keats and Benjamin Robert Haydon is one chapter in the life of the poet which has never been satisfactorily written. A biography, like a novel, must needs have a villain; and in Haydon, Keats's biographers have one ready made. He was an egoist, a fanatic, and—worst of all—a failure; and surely, one is likely to think, whenever Haydon and Keats disagreed, Keats must have been right.¹ The fact is that Keats and Haydon were intimate friends during the greater part of Keats's...