Abstract
Chapter 2 explores the ways in which Keats’s Cockney affiliations helped him establish a professional identity and begin his career. The chapter focuses on Poems (1817), first, for Keats’s gestures of poetic self-validation, especially his presentation of himself as the heir to a vocationally legitimating tradition; and secondly, for the volume’s coterie aspect, as extended by Keats’s historicism beyond Hampstead to a broader community of supportive “presiders.” There are readings of the poems in which Keats envisions a Spenserian genealogy for his own poetic identity; of “I stood tip-toe” and “Sleep and Poetry” for their historicizing of myth; and of the “Chapman’s Homer” sonnet, in which Cortez’s speechlessness, figuring the inaccessibility of the historical subject, concedes the limits of the historical imagination.
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Notes
- 1.
See the detailed accounts of the strategic and practical challenges raised by Keats’s first volume in Andrew Motion (132–163), Nicholas Roe (John Keats: A New Life 131–148), and especially John Barnard (“First Fruits or ‘First Blights’” 71–101).
- 2.
Bennett discusses the expressive challenges created when the posthumous orientation of Romantic narrative obligates it to “an undecidable and forever-absent addressee” as his first chapter begins and then turns to Poems (15, 62–72).
- 3.
Kucich (“Keats’s literary tradition” 239). In pursuing this issue in Poems (1817), I am also indebted to Jack Stillinger’s seminal discussion of vocational validation as the organizing theme of the book (“The Order of Poems in Keats’s First Volume,” Stillinger 1–13).
- 4.
Stuart Sperry has demonstrated that the woodcut on the title page of Poems, although often identified as Spenser, is in truth a representation of Shakespeare modeled on the bust in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford: see “Richard Woodhouse’s Interleaved and Annotated Copy of Keats’s Poems” (120–121). But further, Roe cites a letter from Haydon to Hunt showing that the bust was well known to the Hunt circle, which suggests that Keats himself recognized and intended the engraving on the title page of Poems (1817) as an image of Shakespeare (Fiery Heart 217–218). Spenser and Hunt nonetheless remained the paramount stylistic influences on the verse and ethos of Poems. The tendency to identify the volume’s title-page icon as Spenser began with Keats’s first reviewers. George Felton Mathew remarked that a “quotation from, and a wood-engraving of Spencer” formed a judicious introduction to poems so reminiscent of Spenser, in his review of Poems in the May 1817 European Magazine (KCH 51); the anonymous reviewer in the October 1817 Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany remarked similarly “‘Sage, serious’ Spencer…is Mr Keats’s favourite. He takes his motto from him,—puts his head on his title-page,—” while also writing one poem in Spenserian stanzas and scattering “Spencerianisms…through all his other verses” (KCH 71).
- 5.
My quoted phrases come from William Hazlitt, “Sismondi’s Literature of the South” (CWH 16.53), and Leigh Hunt’s second essay in “The Round Table” (SWLH 2.12).
- 6.
For many Regency readers, Kucich shows, “the dimension of Spenser’s political life that seemed most interesting was his purported hardship under the sway of a hostile Elizabethan court” (Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism 87).
- 7.
Byron dismissively used the phrase “Suburban School” for Hunt’s literary circle, thereby deprecating Hampstead provincialism, in his 4 August 1821 letter to John Murray (Byron’s Letters & Journals 8.166).
- 8.
David Hill Radcliffe (53). For Byron’s cynicism about Waterloo and its aftermath, see Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto 3, stanzas 17–45. For an example of conservative unhappiness with the ubi sunt political reflections of Childe Harold 3, consult Walter Scott’s review (Byron: The Critical Heritage 92–95).
- 9.
See Hunt’s invocation of chivalry and fairyland, and comparison of himself to Arthur surrounded by cultivated ladies and gallant knights, in his first essay on “The Round Table” (SWLH 2.8–9).
- 10.
Hunt misplaced Shelley’s original letter, but referred to its pseudonymous signature in publishing the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” in The Examiner: “The following Ode, originally announced under the signature of the Elfin Knight, we have since found to be from the pen of the author, whose name was mentioned among others a week or two back in an article entitled ‘Young Poets’”; The Examiner (19 January 1817): 41. Reiman and Fraistat’s note to the Dedication to The Revolt of Islam (1.3) in The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley (3.630) lists other instances of Shelley referring to himself as a Spenserian knight, including an entry in Mary Shelley’s 1814–1815 journal (“The Maie & her Elfin Knight”), indicating familiar recourse to Spenserian idioms for social and personal relationships (1.80). Keats calls Spenser “Elfin-Poet” in his 1818 sonnet to Reynolds, “Spenser, a jealous honorer of thine” (5).
- 11.
Kucich remarks perceptively that “Becoming a part of London’s literary circles was another important means of validating his election as a poet.… To share their [the Cockneys’] appreciation of Spenser meant staking a certain vicarious claim to membership in their circles,” and Keats consequently embraced Spenser at times “with a zeal that had as much to do with the embrace of contemporaries like Hunt as with the kinship of Spenser” (Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism 147).
- 12.
Hunt, “Young Poets” (SWLH 2.73); Preface to Foliage (15).
- 13.
Jonathan Kramnick shows that mid-eighteenth-century criticism adopted a historical critical method—represented by Warton’s 1754 Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser and Hurd’s 1762 Letters on Chivalry and Romance—that indelibly associated Spenser with chivalry for later readers (137–189).
- 14.
Hunt, “Mr Keats’s Poems, &c.—(Continued)” (rpt. SWLH 2.122–125, quotation 124). As the editors’ headnote makes clear, Hunt’s 1817 review of Keats’s first volume was initially published in three installments in The Examiner from 29 June, to 6 July, to 13 July. The statement cited in the body of my argument comes from the second of these installments; the first and third also appear in SWLH (2.115–117, 126–129).
- 15.
Mary Shelley (Journals 1.25). Hazlitt criticized the poem as self-regarding and dramatically sluggish, and concluded by declaring his preference for even a futile revolutionary optimism over the conservative accommodations that Wordsworth advocated, in “Observations on Mr. Wordsworth’s Poem The Excursion” and “The Same Subject Continued” (CWH 4.111–120, 120–125).
- 16.
Hazlitt, “On Burns and the Old English Ballads,” from Lectures on the English Poets (CWH 5.131). When Hazlitt deplores the absence of common human passion in Wordsworth’s poetry—“in Mr. Wordsworth there is a total disunion and divorce of the faculties of the mind from those of the body” (CWH 5.131)—the charge of asexuality follows almost unavoidably.
- 17.
For Coleridge’s familiarity with the Higher Criticism and its treatment of myth, see Elinor Shaffer, “Kubla Khan” and The Fall of Jerusalem. Jerome J. McGann argues that the narrative form of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner depends on Coleridge’s familiarity with the Higher Criticism, in “The Meaning of the Ancient Mariner.”
- 18.
“I stood tip-toe” (3–7, 43–48, and 57). See Bewell’s close readings of the images of “Sleep and Poetry” for their “anthropomorphic sexualization of flowers” (“Realm of Flora” 80–86, quotation 84).
- 19.
I cite George Sandys’s classic Renaissance translation of the Metamorphoses, the one that Keats read and used for his early poetry through Endymion.
- 20.
As Derek Lowe stresses, in “Wordsworth’s ‘Unenlightened Swain’” (142–143). Susan Wolfson writes similarly that whereas in The Excursion “Wordsworth tends to praise the imaginative force of these mythologies from the perspective of a lingering nostalgia,” Keats in Poems “seeks mythology as a readily available idiom through which to explore present mysteries of imagination” (Wolfson 207).
- 21.
Lowe revisits the story of Keats reciting his mythopoeic “Hymn to Pan” to Wordsworth and asks why—in light of Wordsworth’s sneering response, “a Very pretty piece of Paganism”—Keats willingly undertook the recitation to begin with. The unavoidable explanation, Lowe contends, is that Keats simply “saw nothing in ‘The Hymn to Pan’ to give Wordsworth offense or to prevent the performance” (“Wordsworth’s ‘Unenlightened Swain’” 140). For Haydon’s account of this famous exchange, see his letter to Edward Moxon (KC 2.143–144).
- 22.
Warton (2.408); Hunt (The Feast of the Poets 56). Pope’s dependence on Boileau, to whom he wrote laudatory poems, was widely recognized in the eighteenth century.
- 23.
Gray’s comment comes from his notes to “The Progress of Poetry,” usually published with the poem. I discuss the notion that native British genius miscarried when eighteenth-century neoclassical poetry became a “French School,” a common claim in Regency criticism, in Chapter 1.
- 24.
Hunt (Preface to Foliage 11–12). For Hunt’s criticism of Pope’s “monotonous and cloying versification” in The Feast of the Poets volume, see his complaint that Pope employs “scarcely any other pauses than at the fourth or fifth syllable, and both with little variation of accent,” from The Feast of the Poets (27, 34).
- 25.
For Keats’s identifications of modern poets in this section of “Sleep and Poetry,” I follow Woodhouse’s notations (155–156).
- 26.
Hunt, “The Round Table. No. 24,” The Examiner (5 November 1815): 715.
- 27.
Hazlitt, “Lecture VIII. On the Living Poets,” from Lectures on the English Poets (CWH 5.153). Hazlitt’s statements reflect attitudes current in the Cockney circle, but were not made public until his lecture series of early 1818.
- 28.
Hunt, “Mr Keats’s Poems, &c.—(Concluded),” The Examiner (13 July, 1817), rpt. SWLH 2.128. In Hunt’s defense, he may have felt (with Woodhouse) that Keats was thinking of Christabel, in which Hazlitt himself had in 1816 sensed “something disgusting” (“Mr. Coleridge’s Christabel,” CWH 19.33).
- 29.
Hunt (The Feast of Poets 12). In addition to being quite amusing, these lines surely also look ahead to Keats’s later remark that a modern poet, circumscribed by his self-absorption, “like an Elector of Hanover governs his petty state, & knows how many straws are swept daily from the Causeways” (KL 1.224).
- 30.
Reynolds, “The Pilgrimage of Living Poets,” The Champion (7 April 1816): 110.
- 31.
From the fourth “Cockney School of Poetry” review (KCH 109).
- 32.
As John Kandl argues, in “Private Lyrics in the Public Sphere” (85). Kucich discusses the political implications of “Chapman’s Homer” in “Keats’s literary tradition” (242–244).
- 33.
As an example, see Hunt’s “Spanish South America” (SWLH 1.145–149). Charles Rzepka includes a brief but informative summary of Cockney interest in, and Examiner coverage of, the South American revolutions in “‘Cortez—or Balboa, or Somebody Like That’” (52–54).
- 34.
Lawrence Lipking (The Life of the Poet 3, 4, 8). Hunt first commented that Keats’s sonnet “completely announced the new poet taking possession” in Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (248).
- 35.
Rzepka (“Cortez—or Balboa” 65–71) shows that in describing Cortez’s late efforts to promote his career, Robertson uses ambiguous language that might easily be misconstrued as indicating that Cortez himself ventured into Darien and, following in Balboa’s footsteps, experienced his own first sight of the Pacific. Keats apparently misinterpreted Robertson in precisely this way, the argument goes, and quite knowingly and deliberately devotes his sonnet to celebrating Cortez’s vicarious re-experience of Balboa’s success in reaching the western shoreline of Panama. I follow Rzepka, but interested readers should see William Logan’s reservations about Rzepka’s argument in “Keats’s Chapman’s Homer” (21–22n).
- 36.
Levinson (15). Despite the obvious perceptiveness of Levinson’s much-discussed study, I have not found her approach to Keats easy to use. Levinson takes the representation of Keats in the Cockney School reviews to be an accurate, trenchant assessment of his real social standing and class aspirations, and interprets the poetry from those premises. See Roe’s criticisms of Levinson in JKCD (6–15); and Stillinger’s review of Keats’s Life of Allegory in Nineteenth-Century Literature 4 (1989): 390–393. For an approach allied to Levinson, readers can consult Thomas Pfau’s argument that Keats’s early style parodies the banal commodification of language in a modern culture, thereby executing an assault on both the literary establishment—a way of exposing the class-based premises of canonical decorum—and the sensibilities of conventional readers, in Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy (344–365).
- 37.
Regarding the anxiety about social marginalization supposedly shadowing Keats’s sonnet, and ostensibly evident in his inability to read Greek above all, Andrew Franta argues that rather than translation signifying “Keats’s distance from the tradition he seeks to enter” in “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” it instead “comes to look like the representation of, rather than an obstacle to, the sublimity of the Homeric text” (106).
- 38.
W. J. Bate provides an even-handed account of how Keats, striving to find subjects for the poems that his first volume required, both experienced and overcame an uncomfortable awareness of how much had already been written (69–76).
- 39.
In a similar fashion, Emily Rohrbach argues that Keats’s aesthetic appropriation of Robertson in the “Chapman’s Homer” sonnet stages Cortez’s astonishment as a disruption of historical intelligibility and the idea of progress (“Reading the Heart, Reading the World: Keats’s Historiographical Aesthetic” 275–288).
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Ulmer, W.A. (2017). History and Vocation in Poems (1817). In: John Keats. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47084-9_2
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