Comment by yesenadam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yesenadam | Hacker News Reader

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(I had to look up who Dan Simmons is.) An American science fiction and horror writer "deserves some credit" for popularizing Keats?! Sounds absurd, but I wouldn't know. I hadn't noticed Keats is more popular than when I first was into him in the 80s. Here's something better than a guess:

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.

If you look up non-English corpus, you can see an effect. Here in Spanish, but also in French and Italian ones.

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.

I would expect that Dan Simmons would have some effect on people reading Keats, but not especially great as Simmons is not to my knowledge enormously popular.

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.

Anecdotal, but I also got introduced to Keats by reading Hyperion by Simmons

Me too. but I only read scifi/fantasy

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