Keats and Mary Tighe

Abstract

The first poet to cast a spell upon the impressionable mind of the youthful Keats was Mary Tighe. When Mrs. Tighe's Psyche and Other Poems was published in London, Keats, then in his sixteenth year, was fresh from school, where he had revelled in Lemprière and Spence's Polymetis. In the work of the Irish poetess the young reader found chivalric romance and Greek myth against a background of Celtic landscape and mood. The romantic melancholy and the luxuriant imagery of the Psyche touched the springs of his imagination; rhythm and phrase impressed themselves upon his memory and became a part of the fabric of his verse. The biographers and critics of Keats have done scant justice to Mrs. Tighe. Her influence upon the pseudo-Spenserian pieces of his earlier years has been recognized, but the fact that the Irish poetess was one of the most important sources of his poetic inspiration and vocabulary has been overlooked.