Nicholas Roe
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198186298
- eISBN:
- 9780191674495
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198186298.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
The title-page of Poems, by John Keats was carefully arranged to announce the relationship between liberal politics and the poet's imaginative life. John Wilson Croker, reviewing Endymion in the ...
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The title-page of Poems, by John Keats was carefully arranged to announce the relationship between liberal politics and the poet's imaginative life. John Wilson Croker, reviewing Endymion in the Quarterly, elucidated the politics of Keats's style by characterizing his poetry as an anarchy of neologisms and run-on couplets, to be understood only in so far as Keats was ‘a copyist’ of Mr. Hunt but more unintelligible. Reviews of Poems and Endymion described the poetry as ‘remarkably abstracted’, ‘indiscriminate’, ‘the shadowings of unsophisticated emotions’, and ‘indistinct and confused’ — and some of the reviewers found these effects attractive. Keats's poems ‘lisping sedition’ reveals that his poetry was thoroughly (and to some eyes, dangerously) engaged with contemporary politics. His vocabulary and poetic idiom were intensely freighted with moral, social, and political meanings. His ‘mawkishness’ was not just the impotence of an adolescent poet; it represented a more radical unsettlement, the poetics of dissent which defined Keats's opposition to establishment ideology.Less
The title-page of Poems, by John Keats was carefully arranged to announce the relationship between liberal politics and the poet's imaginative life. John Wilson Croker, reviewing Endymion in the Quarterly, elucidated the politics of Keats's style by characterizing his poetry as an anarchy of neologisms and run-on couplets, to be understood only in so far as Keats was ‘a copyist’ of Mr. Hunt but more unintelligible. Reviews of Poems and Endymion described the poetry as ‘remarkably abstracted’, ‘indiscriminate’, ‘the shadowings of unsophisticated emotions’, and ‘indistinct and confused’ — and some of the reviewers found these effects attractive. Keats's poems ‘lisping sedition’ reveals that his poetry was thoroughly (and to some eyes, dangerously) engaged with contemporary politics. His vocabulary and poetic idiom were intensely freighted with moral, social, and political meanings. His ‘mawkishness’ was not just the impotence of an adolescent poet; it represented a more radical unsettlement, the poetics of dissent which defined Keats's opposition to establishment ideology.
Porscha Fermanis
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748637805
- eISBN:
- 9780748652181
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748637805.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter concentrates on Endymion and The Eve of St. Agnes. While William Hazlitt's comments do not explicitly refer to the historical elements of Walter Scott's and Godwin's novels, his ...
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This chapter concentrates on Endymion and The Eve of St. Agnes. While William Hazlitt's comments do not explicitly refer to the historical elements of Walter Scott's and Godwin's novels, his distinction between external and internal modes of observation has clear affinities with the way in which those writers themselves believed that history could be represented in fiction and in extra-historical genres such as biography and memoir. In both Endymion and The Eve, John Keats presents aspects of sentimentalist historiography — interiority, privatisation, historical evocation — within the framework of a staged sense of developmental progression. The inherently sociological orientation of Endymion and The Eve is made explicit in the Hyperion poems, which dramatise the encounter between the Titans and the Olympians as an anthropological clash between two different societal stages, although in both cases this narrative of human development is somewhat compromised by Keats' inability or disinclination to finish the poems.Less
This chapter concentrates on Endymion and The Eve of St. Agnes. While William Hazlitt's comments do not explicitly refer to the historical elements of Walter Scott's and Godwin's novels, his distinction between external and internal modes of observation has clear affinities with the way in which those writers themselves believed that history could be represented in fiction and in extra-historical genres such as biography and memoir. In both Endymion and The Eve, John Keats presents aspects of sentimentalist historiography — interiority, privatisation, historical evocation — within the framework of a staged sense of developmental progression. The inherently sociological orientation of Endymion and The Eve is made explicit in the Hyperion poems, which dramatise the encounter between the Titans and the Olympians as an anthropological clash between two different societal stages, although in both cases this narrative of human development is somewhat compromised by Keats' inability or disinclination to finish the poems.
Simon Jarvis
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823271030
- eISBN:
- 9780823271085
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823271030.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Jarvis explores, or more precisely, “tumbles into” the “deep thicket of new verse rhythms, textures, sentences, techniques” of a “masterpiece” of “simultaneous archaism and innovation.” As a “slap in ...
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Jarvis explores, or more precisely, “tumbles into” the “deep thicket of new verse rhythms, textures, sentences, techniques” of a “masterpiece” of “simultaneous archaism and innovation.” As a “slap in the face” of contemporary “public taste,” Keats announces with Endymion a “poetics [that] remains to be written.” Indeed, the craft of the poem might be a measure of its contemporaneity in that it opens onto possibilities of the “now” that are not reducible to its historical values.Less
Jarvis explores, or more precisely, “tumbles into” the “deep thicket of new verse rhythms, textures, sentences, techniques” of a “masterpiece” of “simultaneous archaism and innovation.” As a “slap in the face” of contemporary “public taste,” Keats announces with Endymion a “poetics [that] remains to be written.” Indeed, the craft of the poem might be a measure of its contemporaneity in that it opens onto possibilities of the “now” that are not reducible to its historical values.
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846312113
- eISBN:
- 9781846315145
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846312113.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This chapter examines the efforts of Bryan Cornwall to redeem the reputation of John Keats, his more talented but commercially unsuccessful rival. It explains that after an unfavorable critical ...
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This chapter examines the efforts of Bryan Cornwall to redeem the reputation of John Keats, his more talented but commercially unsuccessful rival. It explains that after an unfavorable critical review of Keats' Lamia and Endymion, he sent two letters to the editor of the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany in defence of Keats' works. It provides evidence that those letters were written by Cornwall and not by Keats' close friend John Hamilton Reynolds. This chapter also considers the thorny issue of rivalry between Keats and Cornwall and the equally contentious issue of mutual influence.Less
This chapter examines the efforts of Bryan Cornwall to redeem the reputation of John Keats, his more talented but commercially unsuccessful rival. It explains that after an unfavorable critical review of Keats' Lamia and Endymion, he sent two letters to the editor of the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany in defence of Keats' works. It provides evidence that those letters were written by Cornwall and not by Keats' close friend John Hamilton Reynolds. This chapter also considers the thorny issue of rivalry between Keats and Cornwall and the equally contentious issue of mutual influence.
Henry Stead
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- December 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780198744887
- eISBN:
- 9780191806001
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198744887.003.0006
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Poetry and Poets: Classical, Early, and Medieval, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
Chapter 5 concerns John Keats’s reception of Catullus. It poses relatively straightforward questions: could Keats have read Catullus, and did Keats read Catullus? Images and ideas associated with ...
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Chapter 5 concerns John Keats’s reception of Catullus. It poses relatively straightforward questions: could Keats have read Catullus, and did Keats read Catullus? Images and ideas associated with Catullus were an essential part of Keats’s countercultural classical style. Through the accumulation of allusion with Catullus it becomes clear that for Keats Catullus was one of the most important literary influences from the classical world. A Keats with a new cultural confidence emerges through discussion of ‘Sleep and Poetry’, ‘Endymion’, and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’.Less
Chapter 5 concerns John Keats’s reception of Catullus. It poses relatively straightforward questions: could Keats have read Catullus, and did Keats read Catullus? Images and ideas associated with Catullus were an essential part of Keats’s countercultural classical style. Through the accumulation of allusion with Catullus it becomes clear that for Keats Catullus was one of the most important literary influences from the classical world. A Keats with a new cultural confidence emerges through discussion of ‘Sleep and Poetry’, ‘Endymion’, and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’.
Karen Swann
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780823284184
- eISBN:
- 9780823286157
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823284184.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s account of the shock effect that is central to modern experience, this chapter argues that the materials of Keat’s posthumous life, circulating with his poetry, produce ...
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Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s account of the shock effect that is central to modern experience, this chapter argues that the materials of Keat’s posthumous life, circulating with his poetry, produce the conditions for biographical fascination, which arises when poetic figures come unpredictably to revive biographical materials as an unassimilable burden of reference. Turning to Keats’s own figurations of the poet in Endymion and The Fall of Hyperion, the chapter proposes that Keats’s poet-figures dramatize what Samuel Weber, following Benjamin, calls “the singular leave-taking of the singular” that is the very condition of modern experience. The modernity of Keats’s poetry involves this signaling and remembrance of lost singularity, an effect that detonates again in the reader’s relation to the biographical figure of Keats.Less
Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s account of the shock effect that is central to modern experience, this chapter argues that the materials of Keat’s posthumous life, circulating with his poetry, produce the conditions for biographical fascination, which arises when poetic figures come unpredictably to revive biographical materials as an unassimilable burden of reference. Turning to Keats’s own figurations of the poet in Endymion and The Fall of Hyperion, the chapter proposes that Keats’s poet-figures dramatize what Samuel Weber, following Benjamin, calls “the singular leave-taking of the singular” that is the very condition of modern experience. The modernity of Keats’s poetry involves this signaling and remembrance of lost singularity, an effect that detonates again in the reader’s relation to the biographical figure of Keats.
