Address to the Keats-Shelley Association of America January 11, 2014

Thank you, Michael; thank you, Mr. President; thank you, Sonia Hofkosh, for making so much of this evening possible; thank you to the Board, as well as the whole membership, of the Keats-Shelley Association of America; and thanks to everyone here, not only for your applause tonight but for the steady, helpful, and fulsome support of so many of you over many years. I confess I was surprised, as well as grateful, to hear that I had been chosen for this unlooked-for award, having wandered for a time Gothically and phantom-like away from Keats, the Shelleys, Byron, Hunt, and their circles—though I do think I have returned to the fold of late—but I still feel deeply honored and gratified almost, but not quite, beyond words. This moment has been made possible, if I can be said to deserve it, because I am a member (and I feel it tonight especially) of a fabulous community of scholars whose mantra, as per the “sympathetic imagination,” has been to be there for each other again and again ever since I came to know even one of you and started exchanging thoughts with, and stealing ideas from, my fellow Romanticists from the mid-1970s on. So much of what so many of you have written, taught, expressed, and emailed to me has gone into my publications and teaching—I hope with the credit you all deserve—that I cannot thank individually all of you here and elsewhere who have helped enlighten and sustain me without keeping us here all night and approaching the length of Shelley’s Process, which, I acknowledge, would be unforgivable (even as a book of that size would probably be impossible to publish today). I trust that each one of you who has leant me your ideas, knowledge, reference-points, backing, and insights at crucial times, acknowledged by name in my work (I hope, since I can’t name everyone tonight), will know now and always how profoundly grateful I am for what you have taught me over the years and how great you have made my professional life among you both as deeply considerate human beings touched by Romantic fellow-feeling and as brilliant professionals with consummate academic skills of which I frequently stand in awe. I can accept this honor in good conscience only because I know that more than just a few extraordinary scholars by now have gotten this award before me, as they have richly deserved to do and, heaven knows, Steven Jones has deserved to do for some time. To be in his and their company this evening does humble me, but it also makes me feel profoundly blessed in the bounty I have been given for decades by my generous colleagues across this country and around the world.

I do have to spend a little time, though, with a few very particular thanks—after all, “baby, it’s cold outside”—and let me start with the person to whom I have most often half-sung those words. I would truly not be here as a scholar or anything without the partner and love of my life for over forty-five years. I am, as it happens, not terribly good at many of the practicalities of life, and Life (even in Shelley’s dark sense) would have triumphed over me long ago, leaving my work more half-baked than it is, if she had not rescued me over and over with her canny eye for what really matters quite apart from Romantic poetry, theory, and Gothic fiction. In that, she has been wonderfully abetted often by our very special daughters, Karen Hogle Brown and Dr. Joanne Hogle (whom I thank, too, in absentia), but she has been the rock on which my existence has found its greatest anchor and support. Even the work for which I am perhaps being honored tonight could not have been completed without her taking care of Life for both us as she does—and so much more. Shelley’s Process was every bit of 950 pages in...