The Illustrated Wilde

‍The English Romantic, John Keats (1795—1821), was always one of Wilde's favorite poets, indeed he considered him the greatest English poet of the century. When Wilde was just 22 and touring Europe he visited the grave of Keats; his reaction contained perhaps only a little irony when he said it was the holiest place in Rome. 

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‍Wilde wrote an article about the visit along with a verse in homage, which he later refined for his first book of Poems (1881). [1]

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‍When Wilde lectured in Louisville, KY on his American lecture tour of 1882, he included in his talk a reference to Keats' Sonnet on Blue. [2] By a happy chance in the audience that night, to listen to Wilde, was Keats' niece Emma Keats Speed, daughter of John Keats' brother George who had emigrated to America in 1818 before settling in Louisville a year later. Following Wilde's lecture, Mrs Speed and Wilde were introduced and they arranged to meet the next day at her home at 616 First Street, in Louisville. As Wilde recalled:

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‍"When my lecture was concluded there came round to see me a lady of middle age, with a sweet gentle manner and a most musical voice. She introduced herself to me as Mrs. Speed, the daughter of George Keats, and invited me to come and examine the Keats manuscripts in her possession. I spent most of the next day with her, reading the letters of Keats to her father, some of which were at that time unpublished, poring over torn yellow leaves and faded scraps of paper, and wondering at the little Dante in which Keats had written those marvellous notes on Milton." [3]

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‍A few weeks later, as his tour continued, Wilde received a surprise letter from Mrs Speed asking him to accept the original manuscript of the Keats sonnet. Wilde was overcome with emotion and gratitude. He wrote back to her from Omaha:

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‍"What you have given me is more golden than gold, more precious than any treasure this great country could yield me......I am half enamoured of the paper that touched his hand, and the ink that did his bidding, grown fond of the sweet comeliness of his charactery, for since my boyhood I have loved none better than your marvellous kinsman, that godlike boy, the real Adonis of our age.... In my heaven he walks eternally with Shakespeare and the Greeks...." [4]

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‍So memorable was the episode for Wilde that he later wrote an account of his experience in an article entitled 'Keats Sonnet on Blue' that appeared in The Hobby Horse, a quarterly Victorian periodical in England published by the Century Guild of Artists.

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