Reading Keats, Thinking Politics: An Introduction

Abstract

MARKING THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM, THIS special issue, Reading Keats, Thinking Politics, revisits topic of a collection that appeared midway into journal's history. Published in Summer 1986 under guest-editorship of Susan Wolfson, and brought together two terms that seemed present an improbable conjunction. Wolfson cannily observed in introduction the general critical tendency that time to regard very conjunction of 'Keats' and 'politics' as something of a metaphysical conceit. (1) According long-held assumptions about relationship between literature and politics, appeared be pre-eminently apolitical or even anti-political Romantic poet, dreamer who evaded topical issues and whose well-wrought productions aspired a realm of timeless beauty. Since 1980s, conjunction of Keats and has served effectively catalyze a number of diverse critical approaches. Presenting a collection of exciting new work, this issue invites scholars and critics re-engage with how Keats's poetry related questions of politics. The 1986 issue was responding most immediately new historicist reading of Keats's poetry as escaping or suppressing its context. This perspective had been most visibly and powerfully spelled out in Jerome McGann's 1979 essay, and Historical Method in Literary Criticism. McGann's most stringent critique focused on To Autumn, which he argued is an attempt 'escape' period which provides poem with its and offer its readers same opportunity for refreshment. (2) The politics that new historicism found in Keats's poetry was its (politically) reactionary denial of context, which McGann defined as the Terror, King Ludd, Peterloo, Six Acts, and recurrent financial crises of Regency (53, 61). From this perspective, categories of text and literature and politics, and poetry and history presented an intractable and ideologically suspect divide. Complicating that divide, 1986 SiR issue began indicate in diverse ways an engaged dimension Keats's poetry of which we had not been taking account (KP, 196). Morris Dickstein found in Hyperion a vital subtext in its goal of ultimate social renovation by way of disinterested exertions of art (KP, 181); William Keach established radical implications of Keats's cockney couplets; David Bromwich reminded us that Keats's reviewers found his early poetry at once enervatingly luxurious and transparently political and that Keats's letters reveal an abiding concern with issues (KP, 199); Paul Fry showed us in To Autumn not an escape from conflict, but a timely refusal sublimate mortality as a social conspiracy (KP, 219); and Alan Bewell argued that poetry embodied a identification with the suffering and silence of outsiders (KP, 229). With these essays, question about and changed a question of Keats's politics. What followed were a number of books that illuminated ways of reading Keats's politics through historical contexts that these studies worked restore our critical imagination. Marjorie Levinson's extraordinary Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (1988) foregrounded class politics of vituperative socio-sexual attacks on from conservative press as well as from Lord Byron. Levinson argued in sustained readings of romances that Keats's poetry achieved its greatness when he signified his overdetermined class alienation from his materia poetica. Building on Levinson's cultural materialism, studies such as Daniel Watkins's Keats's Poetry and Politics of Imagination (1989) and Nicholas Roe's John and Culture of Dissent (1997) illuminated politics of Keats's reading and how it might have formed his thinking. …