Keats’s Boyish Imagination (review)

John Keats’s perceived relationship to masculine maturity was a touchstone of criticism throughout the nineteenth century. Contemporary critics called his sensuous verse—and implicitly his person—“namby-pamby,” “immature,” “boyish,” “emasculated,” and “unmanly.” Readers of Keats from his earliest publications on have had to come to grips with this line of thought. Some writers have sought to make Keats grow up—either by masculinizing him (Richard Monckton Milnes, who wrote Keats’s first biography in 1848, included anecdotes about the boy Keats getting into fights) or by dismissing those elements of his work that sound frankly juvenile. And Keats was a very young poet; he died short of his twenty-sixth year. In order to construct a fully “mature” Keats one has to drop his early verse as well as most of the four-thousand-line Endymion and the comic verse that both begins and ends his writing career.

More recent work has begun to accept that Keats sometimes wrote and acted like the young man who was, as he put it, “five feet and not a lord.” Susan Wolfson and Jeffrey Cox have explored the exquisite mix of effeminacy and class conflict deployed in writing by and about him. Most biographers—including Milnes, Aileen Ward, Amy Lowell, and Walter Jackson Bate—have tried to create a narrative of a young man who gradually attains poetic and/or political maturity. A countertradition—exemplified by Marjorie Levinson, Christopher Ricks, and Ayumi Mizukoshi—has accepted the sensuous, “immature” Keats.¹

Richard Marggraf Turley celebrates the poet’s youth and unmanliness in his Keats’s Boyish Imagination. His Keats is gleefully and intentionally immature; he deploys immaturity to challenge “the mature force of established power.” Turley denies the plot of Keats’s “development” and argues that Keats’s “strategic infantilism” is a political stance: “It is this present volume’s contention that only by resisting maturational narratives can we bring the true extent of Keats’s challenge to middle-class values, bourgeois ideology, abusive power, exploitative labor-exchange, the strictures of rigidly defined gender-roles, dominant representations of masculinity, and the pernicious influence of polite aesthetics/aesthetic pleasure—opposition enacted through attention to puerility, gauche displays of petulance, callowness—finally into clear light” (7). This list of radical activities that Keats’s work is supposed to perform is quite long, and the political work that his small corpus is asked to do may seem unreasonable. Turley does not really present a sustained proof of this energetic thesis. Instead, we get a series of thematically linked essays, some of which make a good deal of progress in making Turley’s ambitious point and some of which do not.

Most of the volume offers complex, sensitive readings that, while they may not totally convince the reader of Keats’s politically radical effects, disturb the comforting narrative of Keats’s “development” from boyishness to maturity. Turley reads Keats’s famous “To Autumn” anew. So many interpreters have seen the poem incorrectly as Keats’s self-consciously mature final utterance—his farewell to the world. Contrastingly, Turley sees a wish to prolong youth in the poem’s evocations of “lambs” in the midst of an autumn that never quite arrives. The dilemma of “Autumn” is its adolescence: it is poised unstably between immaturity and maturity. This suspension informs many of Keats’s poems, as Turley notes: “In Keats’s most apprehensive moments, a morbid preoccupation with exploring the tensions between maturity and immaturity, combined with an erotic poetics within which Keats’s agency is often severely limited, ultimately produces such hybrid creatures of innocence and experience as Lamia . . . and La Belle Dame” (31). Though I am hesitant about that use of “morbid,” a touchstone of implicitly homophobic criticism from the mid-nineteenth century forward, the author is on to something. Even in the midst of the performance of an “adult” poetry, Keats also performs his youth. Turley reads the work intertextually in this mode, bringing up Barry Cornwall’s once well-known “Spring” in its poetic...