Keats, Condillac and Nathaniel Bailey

Abstract

It is difficult, somehow, to imagine Keats being interested in such an ostensibly ‘un-Keatsian’ pursuit as historical linguistics. Indeed, if the critical literature is to be believed, Keats had very little contact with language scholarship. There is only a single reference to the poet in Aarsleff’s The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860, which cites Keats among the authors whom Tennyson and his philologist friends (the ‘Apostles’) were reading at Trinity College in the late 1820s and early 1830s. The Cambridge Companion to Keats contains an essay by Garrett Stewart with the promising title of ‘Keats and Language’, but this turns out to be an exercise in new critical close reading, focusing on sonority and ‘verbal slippage’ in Lamia, rather than on Keats’s familiarity with the linguistic debates of the day.1 William Keach’s otherwise outstanding essay on ’Romanticism and Language’ in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism fails to mention Keats even once.2 When we think of philologically sophisticated poets, it would appear that Keats does not readily spring to mind.