‘don’t imagine it an a propos des bottes’: Keats, the Letter and the Poem

The way we typically organize a poet’s written legacy, in discrete, standard editions of poetry, (usually) letters and, where relevant, prose, enforces a generic framework that tends to conceal certain forms of writing, especially those with a hybrid character. This chapter is concerned with a particular hybrid form, the poem that is contained within, and is commented on by, one of a poet’s letters. Focussing on some of Keats’s poems that explicitly signal their connection to their surrounding epistolary prose, the chapter explores what we lose when we extract and collect poems out of letters