‘I Must Tell a Tale of Chivalry’: Keats’s Early Reading of Spenser in ‘Specimen of an Induction to a Poem’

Abstract

‘Specimen of an Induction to a Poem’ reveals all the immaturity of Keats’s early approach to romance in its stylistic awkwardness. At the root of such un-ripeness lies Keats’s deliberate partiality to mere poetic enchantment, particularly evident in his love of Spenserian bowers of bliss. By focusing on the poem’s formal arrangement as an incipit to Keats’s later narrative quests, this paper means to reconsider the poet’s ‘anxiety of origins’ and his complex commitment to a traditional and native line of poetic descent, chiefly led by Edmund Spenser. Besides laying the foundations for Keats’s sustained engagement with the mode of romance, the form of the induction determines moreover the poem’s technical success: its self-contained formula in fact does not bind Keats to the narrative exigencies of plot development which the poet was evidently not ready to face by the time he wrote the poem.