In an 1817 letter to Benjamin Bailey, John Keats recalls Leigh Hunt asking why poets should ‘endeavour after a long Poem’. Keats offers two answers to this question. The second, that a long poem is the ultimate test of a poet’s ‘Invention, which I take to be the Polar Star of Poetry’, is often quoted. Less remarked upon is the first answer Keats gives to Hunt’s question, about the value of a long poem not for the poet but for the reader:

For Keats, a long poem is not something to ‘read through’, from beginning to end, in one sitting. It is a space in which to wander, and within which any direction can be taken. Parts may be extracted at the reader’s whim, read out of order, and read and reread again. (Elsewhere Keats writes that ‘I long after a stanza or two of Thomson’s Castle of Indolence’.) On the other hand, Keats – on whose insights into the long poem I will draw a number of times in this book – is keenly aware of the poet’s ‘management’ of a long poem, their arrangement of parts into a structure that rewards reading in chronological order. In his annotations to Paradise Lost, he notes the effects of coming to the opening of Book 3 after the first two books: