As students of Keats’s life and work quickly discover, financial issues loom large for the poet and his siblings for much of their lives. It’s perhaps fitting that one of the earliest letters (of a sort) concerns the fraught relationship between the Keats children and the trustee of their maternal grandparents’ estates, Richard Abbey. The text of the document, pictured below courtesy of Google Books, authorizes a payment from that estate.

For a response to this brief note, we asked the poet Joyelle McSweeney for a poem inspired by it. Enjoy!