SOURCE: Bate, Jonathan. “Tom Moore and the Making of the ‘Ode to Psyche.’” Review of English Studies: A Quarterly Journal of English Literature and English Language XLI, no. 163 (1990): 325-33.

In the following essay, Bate contends that Moore's poem “Fragment of a Mythological Hymn to Love,” published in the 1806 collection Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems, served as an important influence on Keats's “Ode to Psyche.”

In the summer of 1815 John Keats strengthened his friendship with the Mathew girls, Caroline and Anne, and their cousin, George Felton Mathew. We tend to think of Leigh Hunt as the first poet with whom Keats became friends, but in fact Mathew deserves that title. The first of the verse-epistles in which Keats reflects upon his own vocation was ‘To George Felton Mathew’, written in November 1815 as a reply to Mathew's ‘To a Poetical Friend’, published in the European Magazine of the previous month...