WorkJohn Keats

Endymion

Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818) Inferred

John Keats (1795–1821) · 1818

InferredBased on allusion to Cynthia (epithet of Selene/Artemis as full moon) and Endymion: the myth of the moon goddess who fell in love with the sleeping shepherd-prince of Mount Latmus. Cynthia descends nightly to kiss the eternally sleeping Endymion.

QuotedReadMentioned

Documented 1843–1850

Letters • Books

Selected engagements, in chronological order.

Totals count documented engagements, once at the earliest witness. How we count →

Reprints, Memoirs passages, and repeat notes within a single manuscript are shown but never counted twice. Evidence for this work is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →

When Fuller engaged with this work

I. Childhood

II. Adolescence

III. Self-Directed

IV. Transcendentalist

V. New York1record

VI. Europe1record

✦. Memoirs (1852)

1810

1820

1832

1836

1844

1846

1850

1843—

Summer on the Lakes, in 1843

read

“So full-orbed Cynthia walks the skies, / Filling the earth with melodies, / Even so she condescends to kiss / Drowsy Endymions, coarse and dull, / Or fills our waking souls with bliss, / Making long nights too beautiful.”

Fuller, Margaret. Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1844.

Inferred Based on allusion to Cynthia (epithet of Selene/Artemis as full moon) and Endymion: the myth of the moon goddess who fell in love with the sleeping shepherd-prince of Mount Latmus. Cynthia descends nightly to kiss the eternally sleeping Endymion.

1850—

Letter to Richard F. Fuller

p66

quoted · read

“she has at times hoped much you would sometime have dollars enough to traverse land and waves and see some beauteous sights that will be to her memory a joy forever.”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. VI. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Inferred Fuller writes "a joy forever," evoking the opening line of Keats's Endymion (1818): "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever." She does not name Keats explicitly; the phrase is woven into her own prose describing beautiful Italian sights.