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  • Address to The Keats-Shelley Association of America January 10, 2015
  • Nicholas Roe

John Keats had a good deal to say about awards. At school he was repeatedly a prize-winner: John Bonnycastle’s Introduction to Astronomy was one such prize; the “PRIZE MEDAL AWARDED TO Master J. KEATS” was another, with its bracing exhortation: “The race of scholarship may be steep and difficult, but nevertheless the End shall be glorious.” Thereafter, “glory” became one of Keats’s watchwords, as when he said that he “gloried” in a correction Haydon had made to a sonnet; silencing four words with an ellipsis had transformed a mediocre poem into a minor masterpiece.

I want to thank my old friend Jeff Cox for his presentation, and Stuart Curran, Sonia Hofkosh, and the K-SAA for the honor of this occasion—made all the more special by the presence of friends and colleagues gathered here in Vancouver this evening after a trek across the years. To have Jeff here to speak this evening is a particular pleasure, as it is now a full twenty years since Greg Kucich introduced us at the 1994 NASSR conference at Duke University, a convivial occasion when we revived the Cockney School and invented such dubious categories as “high Cockney” (“Me art aches”); “Cockney classics”; and drank libations to the Cockney poet Cornelius Webb, whose Keatsian poetry is brilliantly studied in Jeff’s Keats, Shelley, Hunt, and their Circle.

Having published my biography John Keats: A New Life, it gives me a thrill to join a distinguished line of Keats scholars including Jack Stillinger, Stuart Sperry, Jerome McGann, Stuart Curran, Christopher Ricks, Helen Vendler, Robert Ryan, Susan Wolfson, and Marjorie Levinson. It is almost thirty-five years since the first Keats-Shelley awards were made to Walter Jackson Bate and Aileen Ward, whose biographies from 1963 have shaped subsequent understandings of Keats, including my own. I was fortunate to meet both at the 1995 Keats bicentenary celebrations at Harvard; at that time I had already thought of writing a biography of Keats but had postponed the possibility after being told that Andrew Motion’s was underway.

Many years before that bicentenary gathering I had started with Keats by responding to the music of “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun”—and the idea of the “young poet” appealed, and I think still does, to beginning readers of the poets. This was the time when, in July 1969, I first visited the Keats House at Hampstead—an altogether quieter, less-beleaguered memorial to the poet than it is now. I know that it was the morning of Saturday, July 5, because that afternoon I went on to [End Page 29] the Rolling Stones’ free concert at Hyde Park, heard Jagger read from Adonais, and saw Ginger Baker—the drummer with Cream—awaiting the Revolution in his expensive new Jensen Interceptor sports car.

The K-SAA award is particularly meaningful for me in that the only other prize I have received has a Keatsian association, too. My copy of Miriam Allott’s wonderful Longman edition of Keats’s poems was my award for Modern Languages at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, back in the summer of 1973—now forty and more years ago. The book has come along with me ever since, and I’ve brought it to be here this evening—still in its original dust cover, and with the school’s arms engraved on the front and a book plate inside the front cover.

That book has been much used during my undergraduate years at Trinity College, Oxford, and initially in my postgraduate studies, which saw me spend a year in the Upper Reading Room of the Bodleian Library working on Leigh Hunt. This was in 1978–1979. I read through all of the little books of poems—Juvenilia, The Feast of the Poets, The Descent of Liberty, The Story of Rimini. But there was no one willing to supervise work on Hunt at that time, and the only copies of The Examiner were on microfilm in a ghastly reversed format of white print on a black background, rendering the...

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