THOMAS CHATTERTON'S INFLUENCE ON JOHN KEATS HAS BEEN ADDRESSED by a number of critics, most of whom point out echoes of Chatterton s poetry in Keats's work or trace the importance of Chatterton's image as a frail victim of a hostile society on Keats's conception of the poet and of literary fame. (1) No critic who has analyzed Chatterton's significance for Keats has claimed that the latter engaged in precisely the same genre or project, the forgery of ancient texts, as Chatterton did. In a number of ways, however, we can note similarities between strategies and techniques in Chatterton's poetic enterprise and Keats's. Moreover, these characteristics of Chatterton's and Keats's work are informed by both poets' class backgrounds and political views. (2) Chatterton's influence has been detected in Keats's Medieval poems The Eve of St. Agnes and The Eve of St. Mark, the latter of which even includes a passage of pseudo-Middle English verse. (3) A closer parallel to Chatterton's recreation of fifteenth-century Bristol in the Rowley poems, however, may be Keats's depiction of ancient Greece in Endymion, a poem dedicated "to the Memory of Thomas Chatterton." (4) For both poets, the attempt to revive a past world is in part a consequence of their social positions and has political implications.
