The politics of Keats’s early poetry

Abstract

To read the public dimension of Keats's early poetry, particularly the pieces published in periodicals such as Leigh Hunt's Examiner and then gathered into the 1817 Poems , is not only to experience the stirrings of power unleashed in the poems of 1819-20 but also to recover a more pronounced public and political register than some later works would suggest. This chapter, without promoting public or political over personal and aesthetic intentions, shows how brilliantly Keats could join these interests. Keats in The Examiner Keats’s public career begins with Leigh Hunt’s essay, “Young Poets,” in his weekly reform-minded newspaper, The Examiner , which quoted in full the sonnet On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer (1 December 1816). Hunt, the editor, injected Keats (along with Shelley and J. H. Reynolds) into an arena of political controversy: fresh from two years in prison for “libeling” the Prince Regent, he was undaunted in his attacks on Tory corruption, and not shy about enlisting his literary enthusiasms to the cause. In the language of a manifesto, Hunt promotes this new “school of poetry” to “extinguish the French one that has prevailed among us since the time of Charles the 2nd”: the neoclassical “school” of order and decorum favored by the Tory establishment and epitomized by Alexander Pope (1688–1744), whose poetry was virtually synonymous with the well measured “heroic couplet,” whose recurring models of style and decorum were the court and aristocratic culture, and whose brilliance, wit, and range of accomplishment were such that the first half of the eighteenth century was regarded as the “Age of Pope.”