Abstract
Chapter 1 discusses Keats’s poetics as an instance of Romantic historicism. From the time of Poems (1817), Keats’s poetry typically places past and present in dialogic relationship, appealing to the past so as to orient itself imaginatively and politically in the present. The Cockney culture wars supplied the context in which Keats constructed this strategic orientation as a poet. Hunt and the writers affiliated with him were embroiled in a complex, contentious program to reclaim the literary canon for their own revisionist writings—and the rich allusiveness of Keats’s poetry signifies his participation in this project. Cockney cultural politics lent contemporary purchase to Keats’s native bookishness, interest in history, and retrospective poetic orientation, and helped determine the shape of his brief poetic career.
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Notes
- 1.
Severn credited Keats with making him “in love with the real living Spirit of the past. He was the first to point out to me how essentially modern that Spirit is” (Sharp 29).
- 2.
Trumpener (xiv). I cite Trumpener for her reference to interests so widespread as to seem obsessive. Despite her emphasis on the resistance of Celtic cultures to Anglo-assimilation, however, my study will generally refer to British nationalism in keeping with Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation, especially her account of how “the fusing of the English and Celtic elites” (159) into a unitive patrician ruling class resolved the looming crisis of governance of the United Kingdom and, indeed, helped engineer the crucial defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo (see Colley’s chapter “Dominance,” especially 149–164).
- 3.
Lockhart opened his fourth Cockney School salvo in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (August 1819), 519–524, by declaring “Metromanie” one of the most unfortunate maladies of the current age (KCH 97).
- 4.
Cox’s phrase, from “The Living Pantheon of Poets in 1820” (20). It is primarily the complexity and prevalence of cultural dispute and controversy during the Romantic era that have required students of the period to amend Jürgen Habermas’s original notion of an essentially homogeneous public sphere and to speak instead of counter and alternate public spheres. See Jon Klancher’s influential analysis of Habermas in the first chapter of The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832.
- 5.
Chandler (“The Pope Controversy” 487). Jonathan Kramnick shows in detail how the “swelling of the book trade, the passing of aristocratic authority, the rise in literacy, the prominence of women writers and readers, the professionalization of criticism, together provoked over the course of the century a recourse to older works as a national heritage” (1). Kramnick argues, with a glance at the work of Benedict Anderson, that “print assembled vernacular languages and audiences into nations: ‘imagined communities’ bound by language, territory, and custom,” and that one consequence of that assemblage was that the “English literary canon achieved its definitive shape during the middle decades of the eighteenth century” (6, 1).
- 6.
Interest in the British canon would have been stimulated by the fact that, as William St Clair emphasizes, the outlawing of perpetual copyright by the House of Lords in 1774 resulted in a publishing explosion that allowed excerpts, abridgments, and complete editions of “the old canon,” as St Clair calls it, to circulate in unprecedented numbers among British readers (Reading Nation 122–39).
- 7.
Novak (116). Novak refutes the claim that Shakespeare was not read much before the 1730s, and identifies both Whig and Tory interpretations in the reading and staging of Shakespeare in eighteenth-century England. He also notices that in defending Shakespeare in the Preface to his edition, “Pope explained that Shakespeare wrote to please ‘the People’ (1:6) and popularity was purchased at the expense of true art” (133). But later, “in the political tug of war during the 1790s over the significance of the French Revolution,” Frans De Bruyn shows, “the conservative or anti-Jacobin side of the debate pretty well succeeded in appropriating Shakespeare as a spokesman for their cause” (298). This was the interpretive tradition that the Cockneys were intent on revising.
- 8.
“First and Last Romantics” (226).
- 9.
The best-known allusion to a “French model” in British literary history may come from Gray’s “The Progress of Poetry,” but critical references to British neoclassicism as the French School had become commonplace by Keats’s time: Chandler cites examples from Coleridge, Southey, Jeffrey, Warton, and Wordsworth (“The Pope Controversy” 484–485, 491–493). Hunt’s synopses of British literary history recurrently emphasized a recent triumph over the “French School.” To provide merely two examples: first, in the Notes to The Feast of the Poets (1814), Hunt lamented that the writers of the previous century “in general formed their taste upon that of the French,” and avowed, “We are much more likely to get at a real poetical taste through the Italian than the French school,—through Spenser, Milton, and Ariosto, than Pope, Boileau, and their followers” (Feast of the Poets 33, 56). Second, his review of Keats’s Poems (1817) applauds the eclipse of the “school which existed till lately since the restoration of Charles the 2d,” which he denigrates as “rather a school of wit and ethics in verse, than any thing else,” and associates with French taste by remarking that practitioners “got shoots from France, that ended in nothing but a little barren wood, from which they made flutes for young gentleman and fan-sticks for ladies” (SWLH 2.115, 116–117).
- 10.
See St Clair for an overview of these issues: the values typically espoused by “old-canon” texts, the production and deployment of school anthologies, Longman’s reluctance “to accept any text that was not safely mainstream,” and publishers’ concern with female and family audiences (Reading Nation 10–12, 133, 137, 159, and 188).
- 11.
See Blake’s “On Homers Poetry” and “On Virgil” (Complete Poetry and Prose 269–270). In this connection, Colley discusses how the Classical curriculum of the English public schools and universities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—featuring “a constant diet of stories of war, empire, bravery, and sacrifice for the state”—was specifically meant to inculcate the patrician patriotism that the British war machine required (Colley, Britons 168).
- 12.
Butler (131). Shelley and his circle reinterpreted Greek classicism in light of the syncretic mythography of the eighteenth century, Butler shows, and endorsed “a universal sexual myth” opposed to conventional Christian asceticism (129).
- 13.
Butler (123, 121). Butler’s chapter “The Cult of the South: The Shelley Circle, Its Creed and Its Influence” (113–137) shows that poets such as Byron and Shelley used their “common cultured sympathy with the peoples of the Mediterranean” to differentiate themselves from Wordsworth and Coleridge, whose writing, following Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne, they identified as a “literature of the North” that was characteristically “introspective, pessimistic, and essentially religious” (117, 120).
- 14.
As regards the Cockney Chaucer, Hunt typically thought of Chaucer as “one of the great fathers of modern poetry, who was a Reformer in his day, and set his face both against priestly and kingly usurpation”; from “To the English People: Letter II,” The Examiner (9 March 1817): 145. In his second essay on “The Round Table,” Hunt also enlisted Chaucer with Spenser as great poets who “are scarcely known at all” (SWLH 2.12).
- 15.
See Kucich’s discussion of Hunt’s deep personal identification with Spenser (Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism 87–88).
- 16.
It was with Coleridge’s reading of the history plays in mind that Hazlitt rhetorically asked his antagonist in the Letter to Gifford, “Do you then really admire those plague spots of history, and scourges of human nature, Richard II., Richard III., King John, and Henry VIII.? Do you with Mr Coleridge, in his late Lectures, contend that not to fall down in prostration of soul before the abstract majesty of kings as it is seen in the diminished perspective of centuries, argues an inherent littleness of mind?” (CWH 9.35). For his response to Coleridge’s reading of Caliban as “a prototype of modern Jacobinism,” as reported in The Courier—a reading that Hazlitt wittily turned on its head by associating Caliban with Legitimacy—see “Mr. Coleridge’s Lectures” (CWH 19.206–208).
- 17.
In defending the claim in his reading of Coriolanus that the imagination is inherently attracted to the exhibition of power, Hazlitt himself described this attraction as the “original sin in poetry” in the Letter to Gifford (CWH 9.37). Keats admired this passage enough to transcribe it in his 13 March 1819 letter to George and Georgiana (KL 2.75).
- 18.
Jonathan Bate reports a Parisian audience booing a Shakespearean performance and calling Shakespeare a lieutenant of Wellington because of what they regarded as the play’s British patriotism (The Romantics on Shakespeare 26).
- 19.
Bate (Shakespearean Constitutions 156); Hazlitt, “Mr. Kean’s Coriolanus,” in “The Drama: No. II,” from his dramatic criticism for The London Magazine (CWH 18.290).
- 20.
Hazlitt, “On Milton’s Sonnets,” in Table-Talk (CWH 8.176). Southey’s redeemed Milton not only accepts the Anglican faith, but appears in heaven in the “Vision of Judgment” to welcome and applaud an arriving George III.
- 21.
Lipking (Ordering of the Arts 328–329). For discussion of this patriotic myth as it existed on the political scene in the 1790s and thereafter, and for its ironic usefulness in the curtailment of civil liberties, see the chapter “The Free-born Englishman” in E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (77–101).
- 22.
Lockhart headed “On the Cockney School of Poetry. No. 1” with this epigraph in Blackwood’s Magazine (October 1817): 38–40, and reused it in whole or part in the second, fourth, and fifth numbers.
- 23.
Lockhart, “The Cockney School of Poetry. No 1” (39).
- 24.
Lockhart, “The Cockney School of Poetry. No 2,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (November, 1817): 201.
- 25.
Lockhart, “The Cockney School of Poetry. No 4,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (August, 1818): 519–524; quotation from KCH (100).
- 26.
Michael Eberle-Sinatra reviews the reception of Hunt’s poem, and provides a full range of periodical citations, in “From Dante to the Romantics” (120–143).
- 27.
The quotations from Hunt’s Examiner article “Heaven Made a Party to Earthly Disputes—Mr. Wordsworth’s Sonnets on Waterloo” in this paragraph are from SWLH (2.56, 56–57, 57, and 57–58).
- 28.
From Charles Cowden Clarke’s “Biographical Notes on Keats” (KC 2.149).
- 29.
R. S. White suggests that in Keats such “playing” constitutes “the tragic condition” (204)—to which one might add a concern with the moral consolation for suffering that, as White also shows, was central to Keats’s developing response to King Lear (190–194).
- 30.
Keats’s claim that “Milton in every instance pursues his imagination to the utmost” (Lau, marginal note 17, Keats’s “Paradise Lost” 142) recalls Hazlitt’s claim that Milton “had as much of what is meant by gusto as any poet” (“On Milton’s Versification,” CWH 4.38). Keats’s related claim that Milton’s imaginative intensity is nowhere better “exemplified than in what may be called his stationing or statua[r]y: He is not content with simple description, he must station” (Lau, also marginal note 17, Keats’s “Paradise Lost” 142) recalls Hazlitt illustrating the combination of “force and beauty” in Milton by the fact “that the persons of Adam and Eve, of Satan, etc., are always accompanied, in our imagination, with the grandeur of the naked figure” and therefore seem sculptural (“On Milton’s Versification,” CWH 4.38). Keats’s admiration of “the sublime pathetic” in Milton, finally (Lau, marginal note 9, Keats’s “Paradise Lost” 92), looks to Hazlitt’s discussion of the dramatic interest of Paradise Lost and “the mixture of beauty, of grandeur, and pathos, from the sense of irreparable loss, of never-ending, unavailing regret” in Milton’s depiction of Satan, from “On Shakespeare and Milton” (CWH 5.53).
- 31.
I sympathize, then, with Tilottama Rajan’s complaint that “Levinson’s incisive 1988 study does not so much contest the [traditional] figuration of Keats as reproduce it negatively, as the sign of incapacity and social failure.… Levinson historicizes Keats without crediting Keats himself with any understanding of the poet’s relationship to ‘history’” (334).
- 32.
As a welcome counterweight to the numerous Bloom-indebted readings of the Hyperion poems, see Jonathan Bate’s superb “Keats’s Two Hyperions and the Problem of Milton” (321–338). Attending to the compositional history of the texts and Keats’s overall intellectual development in 1818–1819, Bate demotes Milton’s importance for the Hyperion project, showing both that he was not the inhibiting presence sometimes depicted in the secondary literature and that when Keats did turn from him, it was not due to a failed stylistic or poetic agon but because he found Milton’s Christianity intellectually unconvincing.
- 33.
Lipking (Ordering of the Arts 334); Chandler (“Romantic Allusiveness” 461–487). It is poems such as The Prelude rather than Prometheus Unbound, I suspect, that Chandler has in mind in remarking that “Our tendency is not to read Romantic poetry as alluding to the texts it reminds us of. We think of the Augustans as the authors of what Reuben Brower calls ‘the poetry of allusion’” (462). The reference to Brower’s admired study Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion, coming in a study of Wordsworth and Coleridge, implicitly makes allusive affiliation the province of conservative imaginations. Allusion could be variously motivated, however, and for adversarial liberals of Keats’s poetic generation it plainly served as a means of cultural appropriation and legitimation.
- 34.
Jonathan Bate has suggested, perceptively but too modestly, that Keats’s poetry was in “subliminal dialogue with the great tradition of English poetic language” (Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination 199, my italics).
- 35.
De Man, xiv. De Man notes the interplay of different temporalities in Keats, but tends to dismiss the poet’s various turns to the past as imaginatively inauthentic, as when he remarks that “Keats’s use of earlier poets is more technical than thematic; however Spenserian or Miltonic [Keats’s diction may occasionally be], Spenser and Milton are not present as such in the poems” (de Man, xiv–xv). To de Man’s credit, his notion of a prospective Keats has helped orient some of the best recent reflections on a Keatsian aesthetic politics, such as Noel Jackson’s “The Time of Beauty” (see 313–314), Jonathan Mulrooney’s “How Keats Falls” (see 253), and Emily Rohrbach’s recent Modernity’s Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation. For the confectionery Keats of caricature, Yeats can suffice: “I see a schoolboy when I think of him, / With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window” (“Ego Dominus Tuus” 60–61).
- 36.
The question of the politics of Keats’s poetry was influentially raised by Jerome McGann’s new historicist “Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism,” and explored further in the 1986 SIR forum on “Keats and Politics” in large measure prompted by McGann’s essay. Some of the most searching recent considerations of Keats’s politics turn from the new historicism to focus “on the political ‘thinking’ that takes place in relation to aspects of Keats’s poetry irreducible to its material context,” as Emily Rohrbach and Emily Sun write in the introduction to their co-edited special number of Studies in Romanticism, “Reading Keats, Thinking Politics: An Introduction” (231). Although I remain committed to context as an interpretive perspective, scholarship on the aesthetics of form in Keats sits well with my interest in the cultural politics of his work.
- 37.
See Hunt’s 1815 and 1817 Examiner essays “Bonaparte in France Again” and “Impossibility of the Continuance of the Present State of Things in Europe” (SWLH 2.28, 88). Interpretation of Holy Alliance policies as historical regression was a commonplace of Cockney political journalism in these years.
- 38.
“On the Cockney School of Poetry. No. V,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 5 (April, 1818): 97.
- 39.
See Kucich (“Keats’s Literary Tradition” 242–244); Daniel Watkins (26–31, 65–84); and Porscha Fermanis (56–64, 104–110). In addition to the essays cited for their local relevance in later chapters, I depend for my understanding of the great eighteenth-century historians on Roe’s JKCD and on Karen O’Brien’s Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon.
- 40.
See Kucich (“Keats’s Literary Tradition” 250–251) and Fermanis (20–27) for analyses of Keats’s letter in the historiographical context supplied by Voltaire and Robertson.
- 41.
Hazlitt, “Project for A New Theory of Civil and Criminal Legislation” (CWH 19, 303). In his brief “Afterward: William Hazlitt,” Gilmartin cites Hazlitt’s use of this phrase in discussing how both a form of cultural elitism and an insistence on the deeply flawed fabric of human existence, a legacy of his background in Protestant dissent, undercut Hazlitt’s faith in political reform (227–233). In some writings admittedly, essays from The Spirit of the Age for example, Hazlitt uses the phrase to denote merely personal contentiousness.
- 42.
Keach claimed that “no one would want to argue that [Keats’s poems] are in themselves expressive of political convictions more radical and anarchic than those of liberals like Hunt” (190). In responding to this passing reference to Hunt, Gilmartin points to important radical elements in Hunt’s outlook and, surveying contemporaneous usage, shows also that the term “liberal” itself had pronounced radical associations in Hunt’s day (209–210, 211–212). At the same time, Gilmartin allows that “Hunt’s tendency to construe political independence as personal retreat left compelling engagements to be worked out negatively, through a sense of conflict with the system rather than through radical solidarity” (211). Instead of referring to Keats’s moderate radicalism, I have finally opted for the term “liberal” on the strength of the poet’s willingness to apply it to himself—as when, contemplating a career in journalism, he told Charles Brown “I will write, on the liberal side of the question, for whoever will pay me” (KL 2.176).
- 43.
See Jameson’s well-known first chapter, “On Interpretation,” for discussion of mediation as “the classical dialectical term for the establishment of relationships between, say, the formal analysis of a work of art and its social ground” and for the related claim, validating mediation as a mode of analysis, “that social life is in its fundamental reality one and indivisible, a seamless web, a single inconceivable and transindividual process, in which there is no need to invent ways of linking language events and social upheavals or economic contradictions because on that level they were never separate from one another” (39, 40).
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Ulmer, W.A. (2017). Keats and Romantic Historicism. In: John Keats. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47084-9_1
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