SOURCE: Barnard, John. “Keats's ‘Robin Hood’, John Hamilton Reynolds, and the ‘Old Poets.’” Proceedings of the British Academy 75 (1989): 181-200.

In the following essay, Barnard discusses Keats's debt to Reynolds as evidenced by the former's Robin Hood poems.

Much of this lecture will be taken up with an exposition of the important letter which Keats sent, with two accompanying poems, to John Hamilton Reynolds on Tuesday, 3 February 1818. Two larger points are involved. First, Keats's individual letters, even more perhaps than has been realized, need to be read in the fullest possible assembly of the texts, both prose and poetic, which generate them, and with attention to their effect on subsequent Keatsian texts. In the case of the letter to Reynolds this evidence happens to be particularly fully preserved. Second, Keats's own unsure taste, coupled with that of the poetry reading public's, was further enforced by the vulnerability of a...