1820: Poetics “In the Spirit of Outlawry”

Abstract

ABSTRACT Far from simply a miscellany of what are now canonical poems, Keats's 1820 volume (1820) puts forward a consistent program of radical poetics. “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.” I argue that 1820 unfolds a theory and practice that experiment with what poetry refusing a “palpable design” might look like. The romances in 1820 are read thematically as dramas of successful or unsuccessful attempts at controlling the desires of the other. In all the poems the poet seeks to disclose in form and language something acting beyond the reach of the poet's knowledge and management. He formulates lyric poetry as ephemeral and performative, poetic language as independent of its maker's orchestration as “venturing syllables” and as “Chattertonian” (native English) and not “Miltonic” (“artful” and imposed), stanzas as occasions for expansive, that is, paratactic, syntax, and furthermore as deformances of the monumental sonnet form. This project, the article concludes, explains Keats's displeasure at his editors’ inclusion of Hyperion, a poem whose “march” is “undeviating” and written with a “god's” foreknowledge, in a book that experiments with the idea of a poet only as facilitator of an independent artistic life.