Shelley makes frequent references to Keats' own work in Adonais. Among these are allusions to "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," and "To Autumn." These allusions reflect Shelley's faithfulness to Keats'. Though an aristocratic poet, Shelley kept tabs on Keats despite the ad hominem attacks made by critics such as Lockhart and Croker. Though their reviews made Keats out to be a member of the Cockney School, and therefore a pretender to the poetic arts, Shelley bridged the social divide and made sure to keep up-to-date with all Keats poems, and frequently defended them (Hyperion being the most obvious example). When Shelley's body was found washed up on the shores of Italy, he had a volume of Keats' poetry in his pocket.
The preface to Adonais tells quite a different story. Shelley claims to have been an "impartial judge" to Keats, despite having held him high regard for several years before his death. Moreover, Shelley actually argues that he was of the same frame of mind as Lockhart regarding Keats' early works such as "Endymion" and the sonnets. Shelley's choice here to distance himself from Keats is calculated, with the intention of elevating Keats even higher in the elegy. By casting himself as an upper-class, well-educated poet, Shelley hopes to legitimize the low-born Keats as a poet of remarkable talent in his later years and dispel the hostile sentiments of the followers of Lockhart and Croker.
Nicely put! Shelley creates this distance between himself and Keats in order to claim authority over the reviewers and defend Keats from their charges. However, this strategic move on Shelley's part also encodes some his own resistance to following Keats' footsteps. Consider the end of the poem: after celebrating poets who die early, the "inheritors of unfulfilled renown" (397), he still cannot quite bring himself to become one of them (even though he does, in fact, die early, only a year after Keats). After all the celebration of immortal art, what does Shelley fear?
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