Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto in 1764, presenting it initially as a translation of a medieval Italian manuscript. It was the first Gothic novel in English and established the castle — with its subterranean passages, supernatural portents, feudal tyranny, and ancestral guilt — as the defining setting of a new literary mode. The novel was reprinted many times and spawned a vast tradition of imitation across fiction and verse.

The Castle of Otranto directly inspired the Gothic poetry of the late eighteenth century, including works by Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, and Clara Reeve, all of whom used castle settings as sites of supernatural terror and psychological oppression. Keats drew on this tradition in 'The Eve of St Agnes', set in a medieval castle during a midwinter feast. Byron, himself living in Newstead Abbey, absorbed the Gothic castle atmosphere into his verse and persona, making the brooding castle-dweller an archetype of Romantic poetry.