Keats’s Shakespearean quotations and association of ideas’

2016 offers the occasion for two celebrations – two hundred years after Keats’s first published poem, and four hundred after the death of his ‘great presider’, Shakespeare. This paper unites the two, reflecting on how Shakespeare’s words became an intimate part of Keats’s own modes of thinking in his letters and poems, partly evidencing the ancient ‘art of memory’ or ars memorativa, which was undergoing a revival in the Romantic period through the influence especially of Coleridge and Hartley.