The Romantic Reputation of John Keats
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
All were immensely talented yet died young in “romantic” circumstances: Byron at 36 from disease during The Greek War of Independence; Keats at 25 in Rome from tuberculosis; and Shelley at 29 by drowning off the coast of Italy. All of this happened between 1821 and 1824.
A graph of mentions of "John Keats", "Dan Simmons", "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "The Eve of St. Agnes" since 1800. (It wouldn't let me use more titles)
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=John+Keats%2CD...
So I guess the Simmons theory would see an upswing after 1989? I don't see any increase in the mentions of his poems. The name "John Keats" was most common at points during the 1920s, 1930s and 1950s. So.. the graph doesn't obviously support your theory, I'd say. Hard to say. Perhaps Keats poetry sales are up since 1989?
Leaving out "John Keats" you can see much more detail in the remaining terms:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Dan+Simmons%2C...
This view seems to more clearly show Simmons having little effect.
Edit: I first tried ngrams using "Hyperion" but noticed many other things - software, books etc - had that title in the last few decades besides Keats poems or Simmons books. So I tried phrases that I thought would be more safely Keats-related only.
That said I think the work to link them would be Hyperion, and using other texts would probably dilute the relation.
Keats had an important relation to modernist poets, so it would be reasonable to expect he was commonly referred to in the time period were modernism was big.
finally if I was to see an increase in mentions of Keats I would expect to see it in science fiction fandom publications, and the works of authors inspired by Simmons - at least in the 90s early 2000.
My assumption is that after 2010 the people who grew up reading Simmons get more of a voice.
on edit: I know nothing about Simmons other than he is a science fiction writer and he has a book named Hyperion the cover of which I have seen around.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Dan+Simmons%2C...
The effect can obviously be very little in an English corpus. The effect of Dan Simmons' books is mostly to introduce John Keats to casual readers and is even pronounced that these readers have no reason to have been exposed to Keats at school. They (including me) are obviously a low quality public who will not be interested with Keats' work over a long period, just a mere curiosity. They won't write books and won't create a market of books about the poet so I expect ngrams to be a mediocre measurement for this effect. It would be more interesting to look at Keats book yearly sales.
Probably an important piece of context is that English is my second language and I got an education in another language. By the end of my schooling I knew about William Blake and Robert Burns, for example, but not Keats or Tennyson. Same way Pushkin comes to mind as a Russian poet for people outside of Russia, but fewer people would know about Lermontov or Tyutchev.
That said more people probably know the name Chaucer as being somehow an important writer than know Simmons name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos
> [Dan] Simmons deserves some credit for popularization of John Keats
I can agree with your statement, with a big emphasis on the qualifer "some". As other comments have pointed out, John Keats is a major figure in Romantic poetry, well-known and well-loved in English literature.
Dan Simmons' novels may have introduced Keats to those who otherwise may not have read his works. As for me, they certainly renewed and re-kindled my appreciation, as well as seeing some of the poetry in a new and delightfully strange light.
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I also appreciate that this link was posted by a user named "apollinaire". I think we in tech circles could always use more influence and inspiration from the arts.