Romantic Quotation in ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream

Abstract

This essay argues that many of the problems that arise in interpreting quotation marks in two poems by John Keats – namely, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream – are primarily grounded in later editors’ responses to variances in earlier documents. The interpretive moves that can or cannot be made often depend upon punctuation that was invented by persons other than the poet when sources turned out to be at odds, or when documentary evidence proved non-uniform. The variable presence of quotation marks in some, but not other, versions of ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and the sudden disappearance of quotation marks from a passage in which the reader has been led to expect them in The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream provide striking examples of the interpretability of quotation marks in Keats’s work, as well as in Romantic poetry more generally.