Thursday, June 30, 2016
A Letter of Keats
Simon Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; rpt. 2003), p. 188:
From the Look Inside! feature on amazon.com, I find a slightly different version of the quotation in Hyder Edward Rollins, ed., The Letters of John Keats, Vol. I: 1814-1818 (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1958; rpt. 2011), p. 274 (dated April 27, 1818; footnote omitted):
Thanks to Ian Jackson for help.
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Two years later, in 1818, Keats wrote to Reynolds 'I long to feast on old Homer ... If you understood Greek and would read me passages, now and then, explaining their meaning, 'twould be, from its mustiness, perhaps a greater luxury than reading the thing one's self.'31Goldhill doesn't identify which edition of Keats' Letters he's using.
31 Keats Letters I, 239, Feb. 1818.
From the Look Inside! feature on amazon.com, I find a slightly different version of the quotation in Hyder Edward Rollins, ed., The Letters of John Keats, Vol. I: 1814-1818 (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1958; rpt. 2011), p. 274 (dated April 27, 1818; footnote omitted):
I long to feast upon old Homer, as we have upon Shakespeare, and as I have lately upon Milton.—if you understood Greek, and would read me passages, now and then, explaining their meaning, 't would be, from its mistiness, perhaps a greater luxury than reading the thing one's self.—I shall be happy when I can do the same for you.The quotation in Maurice Buxton Forman's edition is close to that in Rollins' edition (upon and mistiness, versus Goldhill's on and mustiness), and the date is the same, April 27, 1818 (not Goldhill's Feb. 1818).
Thanks to Ian Jackson for help.
Labels: typographical and other errors
