Tolling Back: How The Cap and Bells Re-peals the 1820 Volume

Abstract

ABSTRACT Keats’s final volume of poetry is justly celebrated for its longer narrative poems—the title poems and the fragment of Hyperion included at book’s end—and for the odes which remain vastly influential examples of lyric high seriousness. However, at the same time that Keats was preparing his book for publication in late 1819 and early 1820, he was also writing a longer narrative poem that wouldn’t make it into print until 1848: The Cap and Bells. This work was the last major poetic project on which Keats labored before he died, but even so, it remains remarkably understudied. Our essay attempts a reframing of Keats’s final book by reading it back through the lens of his “faery tale’s” satire. We do so by posing a mental experiment: what if the final poem of the 1820 volume had not been Hyperion but rather The Cap and Bells? By exploring this possibility, we aim to amplify the undertones of, and so engage more fully, the 1820 volume’s humor and playfulness.