The Elgin Marbles and the Cockneys: Benjamin Haydon and John Keats

Abstract

This essay examines how the Cockney Benjamin Haydon and John Keats played a crucial role in Greek Revival by exploring how the Elgin Marbles are accepted by these Cockneys in particularized interpersonal circumstances. By payingspecial attention to these Cockneys’ responses to the Elgin Marbles, this essay also explores how their aesthetic and literary reactions gain the cultural power to affect conventional ideas. First, alongwith comparingHaydon’s two drawings, Dionysus and the Head of the Horse of Selene, this essay investigates Haydon’s response to the “truth beauty” of the anatomical Elgin Marbles, which consequently created the novel aesthetic theory against traditional classicism. Subsequently, readingthrough Keats’s four sonnets — “Addressed to Haydon,” “Addressed to the Same [Haydon],” “To B. R. Haydon, with a Sonnet Written on Seeingthe Elgin Marbles,” and “On seeingthe Elgin Marbles” —this essay turns to analyze the different and similar ways in which Keats reacted to Haydon’s perception of the Elgin Marbles. Although these Cockneys were undervalued and defined as cultural outsiders, this essay can be a cornerstone to reconsider these Cockneys as influential cultural figures during the most revolutionized Romantic visual culture.