Keats for Beginners
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Brian Mcgrath is Assistant Professor of English at Clemson University. His essays have been published in Studies in Romanticism, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and Studies in English Literature 1500—1900. At present, he is completing a book project on figures of address in Enlightenment pedagogical treatises and Romantic poems.
Footnotes
1. A Hopkins Reader, ed. John Pick (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 230. I would like to thank the editors of “Reading Keats, Thinking Politics,” Emily Rohrbach and Emily Sun, as well as Anne-Lise François, Erin Goss, and Eric Lindstrom for their insightful comments and suggestions for revision.
2. The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 9.
3. Studies in Poetry (London, 1907), 204. See also Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 12. The reading of Keats as indifferent to politics continues, as P. M. S. Dawson argues in “Poetry in an Age of Revolution,” where Keats is described as “the most apolitical of the great Romantic poets.” In The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 49.
4. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), I.
5. Of Keats’s poem “To Autumn” in particular, McGann writes in “Keats and the Historical Method in Criticism,” “[the poem] is an attempt to ‘escape’ the period which provides the poem with its context, and to offer its readers the same opportunity of refreshment.” Modern Language Notes 94 (1979): 1023.
6. In recent decades the sense of Keats as uninterested in history and politics has been questioned. See for instance the special issue of Studies in Romanticism 25 (Summer 1986) edited by Susan Wolfson; Nicholas Roe, ed., Keats and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Roe, Keats and the Culture of Dissent, and Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). The history of criticism on Keats and politics is nicely summarized by Roe in the opening pages of John Keats and the Culture of Dissent, esp. 3–7. Roe finds in Keats a powerful political voice for reform. Instead of viewing Keats as turning away from politics, Roe attends “to Keats’s eloquence as a representative voice of the most vital sector of contemporary English culture: that is, the culture of dissent in which ideological opposition to the consequent exclusion from the establishment formed the intellectual dynamic of enlightened progress in political, religious, aesthetic, and educational matters” (15). Roe pursues a rich re-imagining of Keats’s relationship to politics, one that is offered in direct opposition to the dominant view of Keats and one that returns attention to the ways in which Keats’s poetry was initially received. The political attacks on Keats published in Blackwell's Edinburgh Magazine aligned Keats with the Cockney school of poetry; in portraying Keats as immature and unworldly, these attacks defended conservative cultural values against Cockney politics. The dominant reading of Keats as apolitical emerges, then, with political attacks against Keats.
7. Robert Gittings, ed., The Letters of John Keats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 398. Subsequent references are to this edition, cited as Letters by page in the text. See also Stanley Plumly, Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008).
8. John Keats, Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillmger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). The poem is found on pages 361–73. The quoted lines are 142–43. Future references to Keats’s poems will be to this edition and cited parenthetically in the text by lines. Keats links poetry to survival, to a death “felt” if not fully experienced. See also Brendan Corcoran, “Keats’s Death: Toward a Posthumous Poetics,” Studies in Romanticism 48, no. 2 (Summer 2009).
9. Romantic Poetry and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 143.
10. See Susan Wolfson, “Keats enters History,” in Keats and History.
11. In offering a new account of Keats’s relationship to politics Nicholas Roe powerfully reverses the more familiar story of Keats’s total indifference. But in...
