Keats, the Novel, and the 1820 Volume: Romance vs. Reality, Facts vs. Imagination

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay adopts the four-stage dialectical sequence Michael McKeon proposes for the history of the British novel as a template for interpreting Keats's career, as he evolves from romance idealism to naïve empiricism, to extreme skepticism, to an aesthetic that reconciles imaginative and factual truth. Significantly, in ways not previously considered, Keats’s engagement with these issues is indebted to his reading of and responses to novels, particularly those of Walter Scott. In a key passage in his letters, Keats favors the realism of Smollett’s and Fielding’s novels over the romance of Scott’s, and in another he copies out a lengthy extract from Hazlitt’s essay “On the English Novelists,” in which Hazlitt contrasts Scott’s reliance on historical facts with Godwin’s superior insight into the human heart and mind. This essay explores these conflicts between romance and reality, facts and imagination, in several poems from the 1820 volume. The lead poem, Lamia, conveys an extreme skepticism that can endorse neither romance idealism nor naïve empiricism. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “To Autumn,” however, Keats achieves an aesthetic in which literary works can be fictional and inventive but also true to lived experience.