How did critics respond to John Keats’s early poems?

John Keats’s early poems faced harsh reception from the contemporary literary press, which frequently attacked his work. Specifically, his early volumes and his first long poem, Endymion, were subjected to brutal criticism in publications such as Blackwood’s Magazine and the Quarterly Review.12

These negative reviews were so severe that some, including his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley, later suggested that the stress caused by the Quarterly Review critique contributed to the decline of Keats’s health and his early death from tuberculosis. Lord Byron also famously mocked Keats in his epic poem Don Juan, suggesting that the poet had been "snuffed out by an Article".1

Despite these attacks, historical evidence indicates that Keats met the criticism with a calm assertion of his own talents and continued to write steadily. While his reputation remained modest during his lifetime and even into the 1840s, his work was later profoundly influential, particularly among the Pre-Raphaelites and Victorian poets.23