SOURCE: "Keats and the Politics of Cockney Style," in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 36, No. 4, Autumn, 1996, pp. 785-806.

[In this essay, Cronin disputes the prevailing critical tendency to read Keats ' poems as conveying explicit political opinions, insisting rather that his views are expressed in the nuances of the Cockney style.]

On the evidence of the poems it might seem that John Keats's recent critics are a good deal more interested in politics than he was himself.¹ "At Dilkes I fall foul of Politics,"² Keats told his sister-in-law, representing it as a social danger on a level with Leigh Hunt's puns and the sentimental ism of John Hamilton Reynolds's sisters. But if his poems have similarly fallen foul of their modern readers, then there is at least good precedent for it. Contemporary reviewers shared with modern critics a sensitivity to the radical import of the poems curiously out of proportion to the provocation that the poems seem to offer. The opening of book 3 of Endymion, in which all the regalia of monarchy is dismissed as so much "tinsel," and the references to Isabella's brothers as "ledger-men" and "money-bags" were passages repeatedly cited as evidence that Keats was as cockney in his politics as his poetry. But the repetition works to undermine rather than to substantiate the charge. Tory reviewers had no need to characterize the politics of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron on the basis of two passages.

G. M. Matthews sensibly explains the reception of Keats by pointing out that Keats's literary career coincided with a period in which the rival reviews had worked so to blur "literary and political opinion" that "it was hardly possible for a creative writer associated with one side to receive fair treatment from a reviewer employed by the other."³ Keats was championed by Hunt, Hunt was the editor of the Examiner, and the reviewers needed no more to convince them that Keats's poems must be deeply tainted by his patron's politics. For the reviewers Keats was guilty by association, and the damning association was with Hunt. But Matthews, like Keats's friend Benjamin Bailey, assumes that the Quarterly and Blackwood's detestation for Hunt can be explained simply by reference to Hunt's being "so decidedly a party-man."⁴ On the contrary, all evidence suggests that it was a detestation prompted more forcibly by Hunt's poetry than his politics, and by The Story of Rimini in particular, a poem almost entirely without political reference.⁵

MY DEAR BYRON

It has become conventional in modern criticism to insist on the relationship between cockney poetry and politics, to represent the attack on the closed couplet of the Augustans as an inflection of the political assault on a closed society. As William Keach, the most scrupulous of such critics, puts it, Hunt's claim in the preface to The Story of Rimini that he had attempted "'a freer spirit of versification'" is of a piece with his desire for a freer society.⁶ But it is Keach's special virtue that he advances such claims only to put them into question. It may be that Hunt's "effort to reform the heroic couplet is an exact image of his reformist politics,"⁷ but Keach is rightly chary of drawing the conclusion that Keats's far more radical experiments on the couplet form, from Sleep and Poetry to Endymion, indicate an analogous difference between Keats's politics and Hunt's liberal reformism.

From 1815 to 1819, the Examiner was a journal divided between literature and politics, and throughout those years it became increasingly difficult to reconcile its two dominant interests, with the result that in 1819 Hunt launched the Indicator, a move that amounts almost to a confession that the languages of literature and of politics could no longer be accommodated together within the same publication. Hunt devoted his own energies to the Indicator, as if in recognition that the political language that he had developed, a language that continued to invoke Charles James Fox as the ultimate political authority, and that found in Sir Francis Burdett its most congenial parliamentary spokesman, had become outmoded. It had been usurped by the quite different language spoken by Henry Hunt and written by William Cobbett and the group of radical journalists that Cobbett had inspired. Given this, it was natural that Leigh Hunt should respond by turning to the other language in which he was proficient, the language of literature. Keach asks what political statement can be deduced from Keats's habit in Endymion of allowing the exigencies of rhyme to determine the sequence of thought, and the value of his question is that it reveals on one level what Hunt's decision to establish the Indicator reveals on another. It shows that the languages of cockney politics and poetry were not one language but two. Hunt's political language was developed in the years of the Napoleonic wars. By 1810, in the series of articles that led to his imprisonment, it is fully formed. The language of cockney poetry, on the other hand, was a product of the peace. It was fully embodied for the first time in The Story of Rimini, published in 1816.⁸

Cockney poetry is most easily defined not as a style but as a relationship between a style and a subject matter. Hunt's poem tells the story of the ill-fated marriage between Francesca, daughter of Guido Novello da Polenta, duke of Ravenna, and Giovanni Malatesta, duke of Rimini. The bridegroom's procession with which it begins and the funeral procession with which it ends frame the tale within two pageants which embody the elaborate social hierarchy that establishes the place of the poem's chief characters at its apex. It is not a continuous but a fractured hierarchy. The nobility of Ravenna assembles in the palace square to welcome the bridegroom, while the townspeople, barred by the palace guards from entering the square, throng the doorways to catch a glimpse of the procession. But a single mood of joyful expectancy unites the nobles gracefully seated on the lawn with the "tip-toe" populace. The poet, Guy Cavalcanti, "the young father of Italian song," is one of the privileged, the center of an admiring circle among whom he dispenses courtly witticisms. Giovanni has agreed to marry by proxy, represented at the ceremony by his younger brother, Paulo, and when Paulo enters the courtyard he secures himself in the good graces of the bride and of all Ravenna by dropping into the hand of a follower a rich jewel, a gift for Cavalcanti. There is an obvious ironic discrepancy between Cavalcanti, blushingly and with a "lowly grace," accepting his princely gift, and Hunt, who wrote his poem as the autumn rains "[w]ash[ed] the dull bars" of the prison cell where he was imprisoned for his libel on the Prince Regent, but it is an irony that Hunt chooses not to point. He distinguishes himself from Cavalcanti more quietly, by surveying the bridal procession from the doorway, from amidst the "rude heave" of the populace.

At the climax of The Story of Rimini is an act of transgression, an act which disrupts the ideal chivalric order figured in the poem's processions. Paulo commits adultery with his sister-in-law. But in the funeral procession which closes the poem, the transgressive act is accommodated. Giovanni's jealous rage does not survive his brother's death: he arranges for Paulo and Francesca to be interred together, and by finding within himself this generosity of spirit, he re-institutes the ideal order that the events of the poem had threatened. It is in his style, not in his story, that Hunt overpowers the palace guards who prevent the common folk from mixing with the aristocratic wedding guests, and he does so by developing the poetic style that its detractors categorized as cockney.

On her journey to Rimini the newly married Francesca travels through a forest. The forest itself is a typically Huntian hybrid of wild wood and Cottage garden, made up of pear trees, juniper, and oak, intermingled with bryony, honeysuckle, and ivy, but over it all towers the pine, "In lordly right, predominant o'er all." Hunt blandly overthrows what Keats calls the "grand democracy of Forest Trees" (Letters, 1:232), and establishes in its stead a woody hierarchy that exactly reflects the feudal order of the human society that he depicts. But as soon as he establishes the dominance of the pine, he diverts the attention from the tree to its cones, its "fruit with rough Mosaic rind." The epithets are at once awkward and exact, and the effect is to allow the claims of the large, "lordly right" to be challenged by the indecorous demand for attention made by the small. The Story of Rimini refuses in its style that graceful subordination of part to whole, and of the less to the more important that secures the economy of classical narrative. Similar effects are dispersed throughout the poem. In the square at Ravenna there is a fountain, and Hunt characteristically captures it at the point when the jets of water lose their shape and disintegrate into droplets, the moment at which the fountain begins to "shake its loosening silver in the sun." All through the tale there is a similar "loosening," as Hunt allows the narrative momentum to dissipate by removing attention from the story to details, from his characters to their appurtenances. When they emerge, as light fades, into a grassy clearing in the forest, the horsemen pause, and allow their mounts to graze, to "dip their warm mouths into the freshening grass." The steaming horses and the dew-cooled grass conspire to make an appeal to the sympathetic imagination stronger than seems the right of such incidental figures.

Hunt always looks at horses closely, imitating, I suppose, the connoisseurship natural to characters devoted to the pleasures of the chase and the tournament. But the effect is to mimic rather than to share their culture. Paulo brings with him, as a gift for the duke of Ravenna, a troop of Arabian steeds: "with quoit-like drop their steps they bear." This is exact—it works hard to capture the delicately vertical fall of the thoroughbred's hoof—but its awkwardness establishes Hunt's remove from any society where the finer points of horses are easily discussed. It establishes his role in relation to the society he writes about as that of the encroacher. Hunt has a clear sense of the manner of address that defines the gentleman. He knows that it is the product of a social confidence that the gentleman can transmit to all those who come into his presence. Paulo has it to perfection, the gentlemanly aura: "That air, in short, which sets you at your ease, / Without implying your perplexities." Hunt's style is remarkably easy, but its distinctive, its definingly cockney, characteristic is that its easiness always implies the perplexities of its reader.

Most reviewers located the origins of their perplexity in the poem's diction, in Hunt's strange habits of word formation. A waist is "clipsome," horsemen travel at a "pranksome" speed, trees are "darksome," and "lightsome" does for the sit of a cap, the fall of a man's back, the slope of his nose, and for the morning star. Items in the poem may be "streaky," "mellowy," "glary," "scattery." There are unusual comparatives: "martialler," "franklier," "tastefuller." Hunt likes adjectives formed from present participles: light conversation becomes "fluttering talk," the happy earth is rendered as the "warbling sphere." Some words just seem odd, as when the hindquarters of horses are praised for their "jauntiness."⁹ These cockneyisms are not best defined linguistically, by calling attention, for example, to Hunt's habit of moving a word from one part of speech to another, so that sunlit patches become "flings of sunshine." Rather they are defined socially, by the perplexities, the awkward embarrassment, that they provoke in the reader. Hunt writes as if he had the freedom of an earlier poet, of Edmund Spenser, say, to invent his own poetic diction, as if he were unaware that poetic diction could no longer be defined by the character of the words used but by the cultural authority that had been invested in them, an authority that allows "finny tribe" to remain unobtrusive but exposes "glary yellow" as ludicrously affected.

Hunt, however, writes only "as if he were unaware of these matters. His is always a knowing innocence, an "affectation of a bright-eyed ease." The character of the poem's style is fixed by a whole series of linguistic swoops, in which Hunt plunges from a precariously, even affectedly "poetic" diction toward a diction that is daringly colloquial. In the preface he defends the habit in formulations that echo William Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads. "The proper language of poetry," Hunt claims, "is in fact nothing different from that of real life." He positions his own "free and idiomatic cast of language" between the "cant of art" and "the cant of ordinary discourse,"¹⁰ but the language of his poem reveals that between these two varieties of cant there is no longer any space. Wordsworth claims for the language of his own poems, the language of "[l]ow and rustic life,"¹¹ a natural authority. It may be a language that survives in the speech of a particular class, but that is because rustic speakers use a language that is protected from contamination by "arbitrary and capricious habits of expression."¹² Wordsworth values their language not because it is the expression of a particular locality and a particular social station, but, on the contrary, because it is "a far more philosophical language" than that often used by poets, and hence retains an affinity with the "pure and universally intelligible" language of Geoffrey Chaucer.¹³

Hunt replaces Wordsworth's key word, "natural," with the word "rural." The refinement of Francesca's sensibility is shown by her "books, her flowers, her taste for rural sights." Paulo is her proper mate because his taste can be summarized in the poem's most notorious couplet: "The two divinest things this world has got, / A lovely woman in a rural spot!" Hunt's "rural" is Wordsworth's "natural" debased from the status of moral principle to that of a variety of taste. "'Twas but the taste for what was natural," and the "taste for rural slights" is developed in the city rather than in the countryside. It has its origins in a childhood spent not in wandering "like a breeze" over the mountains, but in reading. Hence the propriety of Hunt's prefacing Francesca's enjoyment of "rural sights" by a reference to her "books," and hence the special potency for him of story in which the entry into the aristocratic world of high, forbidden passion comes through a book, when Paulo joins Francesca as she reaches that point in the tale of Launcelot when he begins to feel a guilty passion for the queen, at the moment when Francesca begins to feel "a growing interest in her reading."

That phrase does more to define cockney style than an expression such as "scattery light." It is "free and idiomatic," and yet it remains redolent of the "cant of ordinary discourse"; that is, it is an expression that betrays the social class of its user. Whenever the word "taste" is used in the poem, it carries the special charge that it has for a class who is always anxious that it may be betrayed by its predilections, the class that Thomas Moore sums up in his Fudge family. But Leigh Hunt relocates the Fudges in the palaces of thirteenth-century Italy, crediting the duke of Rimini with an ambition that his wife should "haunt his eye, like taste personified," or admiring a troop of knights with the kind of simper that Miss Biddy Fudge reserves for a particularly fashionable beau:

But what is of the most accomplished air,
All wear memorials of their lady's love,
A ribbon, or a scarf, or silken glove.

The result is to superimpose Hampstead on Rimini, so that Francesca's falcon responds to her for all the world as if it has been a canary: he "sidled on his stand, / And twined his neck against her trembling hand." Paulo, meanwhile, trying to shrug off his suspicion that Francesca might have more than sisterly feelings for him, exerts himself to "look / About him for his falcon or his book." The courtly appurtenances, the falcon, for example, survive, but they are overpowered by a syntax that transforms the palace chamber into a suburban sitting room.

In The Story of Rimini Hunt invents cockney poetry as an inverted pastoral. Instead of courtly poets appropriating the language and sentiments of rustics, Hampstead poets appropriate the manners of the court, and infect its language with the cant terms of their own ordinary discourse; rural, tasteful, accomplished. To J. G. Lockhart the effect seemed self-evidently ridiculous, as it seems still to most modern readers. But for Lockhart laughter is not enough to dissolve the perplexities that the poem implies. Hunt's failure to find a style appropriate to his subject matter strikes him in the end not as a comedy of self-exposure but as a moral outrage. Hunt's theme, the incestuous love of a brother for his sister-in-law, stimulates a hysterically violent denunciation that Lockhart is never able fully to explain.¹⁴ In Parisina Byron himself had, as Lockhart knew, chosen a similar topic, incest between a son and a stepmother, and Byron's poem, although Lockhart did not admit it, may have been indebted to Hunt's.¹⁵ Lockhart tries to secure a distinction between the two by insisting that Byron, unlike Hunt, preserves a reverential horror at the breaking of the incest taboo. But his case seems thin. Byron is protected from Lockhart's indignation not by the soundness of his morals but by the soundness of his style, by an ease that remains gentlemanly without ever descending to jauntiness.

William Hazlitt was surely right to recognize that the judgments of the Blackwood's reviewers could be understood only by recognizing that for them the test of political opinion remained subordinate to a quite different test: "It is name, it is wealth, it is title and influence that mollifies the tender-hearted Cerebus of criticism . . . This is the reason why a certain Magazine praises Percy Bysshe Shelley, and villifies 'Johnny Keats.'"¹⁶ In other words, differences of political opinion might be more easily accommodated than differences of class. Hunt's political language remained firmly within an Enlightenment tradition that construed political difference as an opposition of ideas. In the years between 1815 and 1819 that language became increasingly irrelevant. Its place was usurped by the quite different language spoken by Henry Hunt and written by Cobbett, a language that construed political difference as the expression of class enmity. The politics that Hunt recognized, the battle between ideas, was being replaced by a different politics which hinged on the relationship between classes. Hunt found it all but impossible to address himself to this new phenomenon in his political prose. But in The Story of Rimini he had already developed a poetic style that had, as Lockhart's response reveals, a disruptive power precisely accommodated to the new politics of the peace.

In his preface Hunt wrote the manifesto for the new poetry. The preface recommends "'a freer spirit of versification,'" the use of a poetic language founded on "an actual, existing language" (p. xvi), and the repudiation of Alexander Pope as a model for versification in favor of Chaucer. But the radical import emerges from the social gestures that the preface makes rather than the critical precepts that it lays down. The preface parades a culture that is at once ostentatiously displayed and thin—"Homer abounds" with "exquisite specimens" of the "natural" style, "though, by the way, not in the translation"; "with the Greek dramatists I am ashamed to say I am unacquainted" (p. xvii). The preface simultaneously asserts a genial intimacy with the Western tradition of high culture, and exposes the fragile grounds on which that intimacy is claimed. It is at once an artistic credo and a social gaffe, or, better, it is the social gaffe offered as itself embodying a poetic manifesto. The whole preface is an elaboration of the address with which it begins, an address the temerity of which left Lockhart aghast: "My Dear Byron." It inaugurates a new school of poetry, defined, as Lockhart knew, by the class of its practitioners, a poetry that would at once lay claim to possession of a culture that had until then been the monopoly of the classically trained and university educated, and betray its lack of proper title to the culture that it claimed.

JOHNNY KEATS

From early on his career (1817), Keats made anxious efforts to free himself from Hunt's stylistic and social mannerisms, as many of his critics have noted.¹⁷ By late 1818 he was able to write Hyperion, a poem as distant from any of Hunt's in its style as it is easy to imagine. But, in the wider sense in which I have defined the term, Keats remained throughout his career a cockney poet. The narrative poems dramatize tales of encroachment. Lorenzo and Porphyro are interlopers, the one contriving entry into the domestic circle of his employers, the other into the castle of his enemies. Elsewhere, as in Endymion or Lamia, the plot threatens the boundary between species, between a mortal and a goddess or a serpent and a woman. In the lyric poems Keats confronts some item so heavily freighted with cultural associations that it can serve as a metonym for the whole tradition of high culture. Keats stands in contemplation of the Elgin marbles, a Grecian urn, a nightingale, or melancholy, the emotion that beyond all others the poetic tradition has dignified as a badge of cultural attainment. The poems chart the fluctuations by which Keats successively demands his right to a place within that culture, and betrays his bitter sense that its boundaries are patrolled by cultural monitors such as J. W. Croker and Lockhart, whose function it is to preserve culture from the encroachments of those like Keats, whose education and social station do not qualify them for entry.

Of Keats's critics, only Marjorie Levinson has shown herself fully sensitive to the cultural predicament out of which the poems are produced: that is, Keats's intense consciousness of himself as belonging to a class that had no attributes other than its difference. On the one hand, there was the difference from Byron: "I superfine! rich or noble poets—ut Byron. 2 common ut egomet" (Letters, 1:368). On the other, there was the difference, that Keats insisted on, from the likes of Samuel Bamford, "the weaver poet": "I am a weaver boy to them," "the literary fashionables" (Letters, 2:186).¹⁸ His was, as Levinson puts it, in the "neither/nor" position construed by the reviewers as "monstrous."¹⁹ Levinson brilliantly offers "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" as an epitome of Keats's whole enterprise, for it is a poem that at once celebrates Keats's enfranchisement, and confesses his lack of title to the enfranchisement he claims. His reading has made him a free citizen of the Homeric world, able to breathe for the first time "its pure serene,"²⁰ but the metaphor claims a natural ease that the poem's plot, with its ingenuous confession that Homer is available to Keats only in translation, denies. The poem's gestures cancel each other, so that it is predictable that the poem should end in silence. The wonder is that its silence should have been made eloquent, in this prefiguring Keats's whole achievement. He sought to inscribe his own name in the book of literature by the production of poems that betrayed the cultural disabilities that disqualified him from inclusion within it.

Levinson's book is important in part because it helps to explain the failure of those who have sought to address directly the question of Keats's political opinions. The evidence from the letters and the poems is clear: Keats placed himself firmly "on the liberal side of the question" (Letters, 2:176). He addresses politics at length in only two letters. In the letter of October 1818 to his brother and sister-in-law, he repudiates at once Napoleon and "the divine right Gentlemen": "All the departments of Government," and the "Madmen" who would seek to overthrow them, men "who would like to be beheaded on tower Hill merely for the sake of eclat" (Letters, 1:396-7). Between these opposing groups, he recognizes only Leigh Hunt "who from a principle of taste would like to see things go on better," and those "like Sir F. Burdett who like to sit at the head of political dinners." His own intervention is confined to expressions of nostalgia for the Commonwealth that seem rather too glibly to echo Wordsworth: "We have no Milton, no Algernon Sidney" (Letters, 1:396). In the letter of September 1819, he shares with the George Keatses an understanding of English history since Richard II that divides it into three stages. In the first the kings found common interest with the people in accomplishing "the gradual annihilation of the tyranny of the nobles." In the second, the kings turned on the people in an effort to "destroy all popular privileges." In the third, those privileges are reasserted. It is this third stage that has been "put a stop to" by the "unlucky termination" of the French Revolution, but Keats trusts that it will be no more than "a temporry stop" (Letters, 2:193-4). This is the familiar Whig view of history, lucidly and sensibly rehearsed, and it bears not the faintest stamp of the delicate, exploratory intelligence that is scarcely ever absent when Keats is thinking about poets, or poetry, or his own compositional processes.

Like Hunt, Keats had acquired a Whig political vocabulary, a vocabulary founded on an analysis of the nation into three distinct orders: the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the people. It was not, however, possible for him to express his own place within the public world in the terms that this political vocabulary allowed him. Keats was ungrateful to Hunt, but Hunt remains the single most important influence on his poetry because Hunt showed him the way out of his difficulty. Hunt showed him how to write a public poetry that derived its vigor not from the sentiments it expressed but from its style. He showed Keats, that is, how to become a cockney poet.

Morris Dickstein has proposed that the description of Hyperion's "'transcendental cosmopolitcs'" in Hunt's Autobiography should replace critical responses to the poem that confine attention to "its epic ambitions, its sonorous impersonality, and the Miltonic 'stationing' of the verse."²¹ Dickstein suggests an analogy linking Saturn, the dying George III, and the deposed Napoleon. Alan J. Bewell notes that Keats associates his Titans with the art of Egypt, points out that Egyptian art was conventionally associated with tyrannical power and priestly mystery, and suggests an analogy between the action of Keats's poem and Napoleon's Egyptian campaign. A political allegory that allows Napoleon to be associated either with Hyperion and Saturn or with the Apollo who supersedes them seems unusually "transcendental," and neither reading accommodates easily the pathos with which Keats invests the downfall of the Titans. Bewell recognizes such difficulties, and suggests that Hyperion espouses a "political ideology,"²² a Whig understanding of history as progress, only for Keats to find that this imposed on him a political language with which he was uncomfortable. In its "'cosmopolitics'" Hyperion remains incoherent: in its "epic ambitions," however, the poem vigorously places itself within the public world.

Keats seems not to have set about writing Hyperion in earnest until immediately after the attacks on Endymion by Lockhart and by Croker.²³Hyperion is, in some sort, as Thomas A. Reed suggests, a response at once defiant and submissive.²⁴ Keats veers from Hunt to Milton: from couplets that risked "wearying his readers with an immeasurable game of bouts-rimes,"²⁵ he turns to blank verse, and for the anarchically episodic structure of romance he substitutes the more regular narrative sequence of epic. In all this a wish to placate his hostile critics is evident enough. But Lockhart had also derided Keats's lack of title to the subject matter he claimed: he and Hunt "write about Apollo, Pan, Nymphs, Muses, and Mysteries, as might be expected from persons of their education," from persons, that is, whose classical scholarship amounts to no more than "a sort of vague idea, that the Greeks were a most tasteful people."²⁶ In writing Hyperion, Keats defiantly persists in claiming a right to appropriate the mythological subject matter from which, according to Lockhart, his educational deficiencies debarred him.

The plot of Hyperion, in which Saturn and the Titans are ousted, and Hyperion is forced to recognize the nobler music of Apollo, seems designed to express Keats's heady sense of his own irresistible genius. "Byron, Scott, Southey, & Shelley think they are to lead the age," he once told Haydon, "but . . . ," and Haydon's anxiety not to compromise his young friend's reputation for modesty led him to erase the rest of the sentence.²⁷ But Keats was given just as often to intense self-doubt, a sense of himself as having been forcibly removed from the "strong identity," the "real self that would permit him to fulfill his ambitions, which is surely one reason why Saturn's overthrow only serves to secure his place within Keats's imaginative sympathies. It is easy to speak of these Keatsian characteristics as defining a personality, but it would be more accurate, as Levinson realizes, to recognize them as defining the social class to which Keats belonged. They are characteristics that inform the style more completely than the plot of Hyperion, and hence it is in its style, in its "epic ambitions," that the poem makes its most forceful intervention in the public world.

More completely than any other of Keats's poems, Hyperion displays Keats's alternating reflexes, his capacity for "in-feeling" and his concern with "stationing." He inhabits Hyperion's mouth, when the taste of incense sours to the "[s]avour of poisonous brass and metal sick,"²⁸ and he freezes Thea, kneeling before Saturn, for a month in a single, mute posture of despair. So it is that the poem's characters are at once intimately possessed and yet remain immeasurably remote. The first two books are dominated by dialogue in which the "large utterance of the early Gods" is rendered into "our feeble tongue" (1.51, 49).²⁹ Keats can afford gracefully to assume the modesty of the translator in the knowledge that he has so amply recreated "that large utterance," but the apology works to alert the reader to a quality in the poem that aligns it with translation. It is as far as possible from Hunt's ideal of a "free and idiomatic cast of language." The poem displays to its reader the words from which it is made, offers them to be savored as sounds, as actions in the mouth, as the "ponderous syllables" of Enceladus (2.305), or the syllables that throb through Apollo's "white melodious throat" (3.81). We understand these words, and yet they retain a material opacity, like that of the "hieroglyphics old" that have survived the loss of their "import" (1.277, 282). Hence, as in the very best translations, the poem seems to reconcile two languages, the comfortably familiar language of "our feeble tongue" and another language that remains remote and unaccommodated. It is through its style that the poem articulates Keats's understanding of his own place in the social structure, the "neither/nor" place of a class that cannot claim, like Lockhart, the cultural attainments of the classically educated, and yet is unwilling to dispute a definition of culture that confines it to those who know Greek and Latin. But in Hyperion the plot and the style are at odds. The plot allies itself with an optimistic Whig view that understands history as a process in which one "power" succeeds another in obedience to a benevolent "eternal law," but the style gives voice to a social class that can take no part in such an evolutionary process.³⁰ It cannot achieve cultural power because it is defined by its aspiration toward it: it cannot arrive because it has its only being in becoming. In Hyperion, Keats generated a quite new kind of cockney poetry, distinguished from Hunt's cockney by its being not at all "rediculous." In Hyperion, Keats had found a way "to write fine things which cannot be laugh'd at in any way" (Letters, 2:174), but he had not found a plot. Hence his decision to abandon the poem and begin work on The Fall of Hyperion.

In the revised poem, Keats turns, as Hunt had turned in The Story of Rimini, to Dante. It seems, from a modern perspective, grotesque that the cockney poets should have nominated Dante as their ancestor, but it is less so than it seems. Hunt was drawn to a story in which desire is displaced from a book to the body, a story in which nature is a by-product of culture, and hence an appropriate story for a new kind of poetry which would take as its primary subject its own literariness. Keats seems to have been attracted by a poem that so transparently concerns itself with its own place within literary history. The Keats who represented himself as "cowering under the Wings of great Poets" would have responded immediately to Dante's Virgil (Letters, 1:239), at once so protective and so overawing a presence. "Those minute volumes of carey" that Keats carried with him to Scotland in the summer of 1818 were to provide him with the clue that he needed to reshape the material of Hyperion into an episode within a new plot (Letters, 1:294), the defining plot of cockney poetry. It would no longer be a poem about Hyperion ousted by Apollo, but a poem in which Keats explored his own entitlement to write about the wars of the gods.

In The Fall of Hyperion much more directly than in its predecessor, Keats confronts his own cultural position. Lockhart had summoned up a comic vision of a nation suffering from a rhyming plague, "Metromanie," a disease that has struck down farm-servants and unmarried ladies, footmen, governesses, and a young man "bound apprentice some years ago to a worthy apothecary in town."³¹ Keats's first response is moving in its simplicity: "Who alive can say / 'Thou art no poet; may'st not tell thy dreams'?"³² Poetry is not the preserve of the privileged few, but available to "every man," if only he "had lov'd / And been well nurtured in his mother tongue" (1.13-5). The condition seems anodyne enough until one remembers Lockhart's mockery of "two Cockneys," one of whom "confesses that he had never read the Greek Tragedians, and the other knows Homer only from Chapman."³³ The only "breeding" that a poet needs is a breeding in the mother-tongue, and yet within the poem the maternal presence, the figure whose "words / Could to a mother's soften" (1.249-50), is a goddess called Moneta or Mnemosyne, a muse as classical as even Lockhart could stipulate. The poem carefully places Keats in the "neither / nor" position that defines the cockney poet.

In the poem's first vision, the poet finds himself in a forest clearing where a feast is spread on a mossy mound: "Which, nearer seen, seem'd refuse of a meal / By angel tasted, or our mother Eve" (1.30-1). The poet standing amidst "empty shells" and "grape stalks but half bare" forms a tableau that, since Bate, has functioned as the primal scene of poetic belatedness (1.32-3);³⁴ but, as Bate notes, Keats emphasizes the "plenty" rather than the paucity of the "remnants" (1.35, 33). The poet has more than enough to eat and drink. The point, surely, is not at all the meagerness of the meal, but the undignified circumstances in which it is consumed. The poet's is precisely the position of the servant who gains entry to a costly banquet after the authentic guests have departed and gluts himself on the rich remains of a meal to which he was not invited. The passage identifies the poet as an interloper. When he wakens from his sleep. the scene has changed, but not his role within it. The "eternal domed monument" in which he finds himself is clearly a temple of culture (1.71). The bric-a-brac strewn at his feet, the "draperies" and "strange vessels" (1.73), "[r]obes, golden tongs, censer and chafing dish. / Girdles, and chains, and holy jewelries" (1.79-80), suggest what Philip Larkin calls "the stuff up at the holy end," but more because of the reverence with which they are listed than the nature of the items themselves. The paraphernalia corresponds to the half-finished meal: it represents the detritus of a high culture, rich and enclosed, to which the poet has gained magical, guilty access. Moneta challenges him as a trespasser, as one attempting to "usurp this height'" (1.147).

K. K. Ruthven's observation that Moneta was, as Keats would have learned from Andrew Tooke's Pantheon, at once the supplier of "'wholesome counsel'" and "the goddess of money" has intrigued several recent critics, but, with the exception of Daniel P. Watkins, to oddly little effect.³⁵ The reason is, I suspect, that it has proved impossible to graft Ruthven's perception onto a view of Moneta that insists on representing her role within the poem as uncomplicatedly benign. The best antidote to such an assumption is to place side by side Moneta's remarks to the dreamer and Lockhart's remarks to the young Keats. Moneta accuses the poet of being "'a dreaming thing; / A fever of thyself " (1.168-9). Lockhart had advised Keats that he was suffering from a "disease," and belonged to a "fanciful, dreaming" set. Lockhart describes a young man, stricken with a "poetical mania" that has unfitted him for the "useful profession" for which his friends had destined him, "the career of medicine."³⁶ Moneta distinguishes between those who "seek no wonder but the human face" (1.163), and those like Keats whose activities are of no social utility: "'What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe, / To the great world?'" (1.167-8). Lockhart offers his review as an astringent medicine that, if taken, will "put the patient in a fair way of being cured." The dreamer thanks Moneta for having '"medicin'd"' him (1.183). Finally, Lockhart castigates the presumption of "uneducated and flimsy striplings" such as Keats who dare to speak familiarly of their cultural superiors. The sonnet "Great Spirits Now on Earth Are Sojourning" is singled out as a particularly egregious example of Keats's daring to place "himself, and some others of the rising brood of Cockneys" on a level with "the most classical of living English poets": "Wordsworth and Hunt! what a juxtaposition!"³⁷ Compare Moneta:

"Art thou not of the dreamer tribe?
The poet and the dreamer are distinct,
Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes."

(1.198-200)

Moneta's face, "deathwards progressing / To no death" (1.260-1), is itself a fit emblem of the notion of culture over which Lockhart claims guardianship, a notion that conceives culture as a condition of moribund immortality, as the spectral, unending afterlife of the dead civilizations of Greece and Rome, the essence of which is enclosed in the tomblike chambers of Moneta's "hollow brain" (1.276), as in a mausoleum.

At this point, Ruthven's perception becomes crucial, because the forces that guard Lockhart's cultural precincts are, as Lockhart boasts, economic. He ends his review smugly prophesying that no bookseller will "a second time venture £50 upon anything [Keats] can write."³⁸ In the months that Keats worked on The Fall of Hyperion, his true financial predicament seems to have been brought home to him for the first time. He began to cast about for some way of securing a competence: taking passage as a surgeon on an Indiaman, going to Edinburgh to qualify himself as a doctor, writing political articles "for whoever will pay me" (Letters, 2:176). The figure of Lockhart presided over his difficulties. As he told his sister, he would "try the fortune of [his] Pen once more," and should that fail, "I have enough knowledge of my gallipots to ensure me an employment & maintenance" (Letters, 2:124-5).³⁹

Moneta stares at Keats with blank, blind eyes, "like two gold coins," as Ruthven has it,⁴⁰ a ghastly embodiment of the defensive alliance between culture and economics that worked to deny Keats's right of settlement in the "realms of gold."⁴¹ But, as all the poem's critics have properly noted, Moneta's presence in the poem is monitory rather than minatory, her gaze benignant rather than baleful. She says hard words to the poet, too hard for many of the poem's critics,⁴² but she is also '"kind"' to him (1.242), her voice like a "mother's" (1.250), and the poet responds to her with grateful reverence. In the confrontation of the poet with Moneta, Keats achieves his most complete expression of his cultural situation, for it accommodates fully both his capacity for reverence and his stinging sensitivity to ridicule. Keats's impulse is to keep the two responses apart, to maintain " [t]he pain alone; the joy alone; distinct'" (1.174). He delights in fancying Shakespeare his "Presider" (Letters, 1:142), a cultural authority wholly different from the likes of Croker and Lockhart who preside over the reviews. Keats reverences "genius," and genius is measured in inverse proportion to the taste of the "literary world": "Just so much as I am humbled by the genius above my grasp, am I exalted and look with hate and contempt upon the literary world" (Letters, 2:144). But the distinction between "genius" and the cultural institutions that accredit it is precarious, secured only by the passage of time. Keats's acutely erratic responses to his contemporaries, to Hunt and to Wordsworth in particular, are controlled by conflicting needs to hail "genius," and to maintain a lofty contempt for "that most vulgar of all crowds the literary" (Letters, 2:43). He writes a poetry that is impelled at once by a "love of fame" and a defiantly maintained indifference to literary success (Letters, 2:116), and it is to the extent that this ambivalent stance '"venoms'" his poetry that it achieves political importance (Fall of Hyperion, 1.175). Jerome J. McGann has famously described Keats's 1820 volume as a self-conscious and determined attempt to "dissolve social and political conflicts in the mediations of art and beauty."⁴³ The evidence from both letters and poems establishes beyond possibility of argument Keats's passionate desire to find in the world of art a sphere independent of, and dissociated from, the corrupt spheres of power and of money, but just as clearly they record Keats's bitter recognition that the spheres are interlocked, near neighbors that there is no possibility of unperplexing.

OUR CLASSICAL EDUCATION

Modern critics interested in the relationship between poetry and politics have constructed the brief period of Keats's poetic activity, the years from 1816 to 1819, as a single narrative that reaches its catastrophe in Manchester on 16 August 1819 at Peterloo. Hence the oddity that the question of the political significance of Keats's poems has been disputed most keenly in discussions of a single poem, "To Autumn," a poem written just a month after the massacre.⁴⁴ The campaign that culminated at Peterloo had provoked a crisis of style. In these years Henry Hunt and Cobbett were involved in a determined attempt to wrest the radical leadership from the grasp of the radical Whigs, led by Burdett, and assume to themselves a quite different kind of leadership. Burdett and his associates, Douglas Kinnaird, John Cam Hobhouse, and Byron, wielded political power by virtue of their wealth and birth, and chose to place that power at the service of the people. Hunt and Cobbett opposed them with a power secured only by popular support, by the mass readership of Cobbett's Political Register, and by the hundreds of thousands that Hunt could summon to his open-air meetings. Burdett spoke for the people in parliament: Hunt and Cobbett devised a technique of mass protest that entirely by-passed parliament, and in doing so they devised a new political language, the enduring monument of which is Cobbett's prose. It was a language designed not to address fellow parliamentarians or electors, not designed even to address the well-off radical London merchants who determined the outcome of elections at Westminster, but to speak directly to weavers, shoemakers, millhands.⁴⁵ Shelley responded with the composition of a group of poems, chief among them The Mask of Anarchy, in which he makes a conscious decision to essay a poetical style that would proclaim his solidarity with the Manchester demonstrators, a style that required him to repudiate his own literariness as a necessary condition for repudiating the class of which that literariness was a badge. Byron saw what was at issue as clearly as Shelley, but responded with passionate outrage that men such as Hunt and Cobbett should dare to dispute with the Whig aristocracy its claim to be the people's true leaders. He wrote angrily to Hobhouse when he heard that his friend planned to attend a dinner given in Henry Hunt's honor: "Why our classical education alone—should teach us to trample on such unredeemed dirt."⁴⁶ He transmuted his own responses to Peterloo, the Cato Street conspiracy, and the Queen Caroline affair into the play Marino Fallero, and avoided the danger that he might be besmirched by intellectual contact with those lacking a proper education by his insistence on maintaining the rigid conventions of Italian classical drama.⁴⁷ Byron's and Shelley's responses to the political and stylistic crisis of 1819 could scarcely have been more divergent, and yet they have in common a certain theatricality. In Byron's case this is literally true: not only does he turn to drama, but in the protracted agony that he suffered over the staging of Marino Fallero, he contrived to rehearse the predicament of his doge. Just as his hero was forced to capitulate to the necessity of entering into a conspiracy with plebeians that he despised, so the poet was forced to surrender to the humiliation of public representation, and place the success of his tragedy in the hands of the vulgar populace. Shelley's gesture, too, is theatrical, turning from Prometheus Unbound, which was characterized in Mary Shelley's words by an "abstraction and delicacy of distinction" that was available only to minds "as subtle and penetrating as his own" to the direct broadside ballad style of The Mask of Anarchy.⁴⁸ Both Byron's classicism and Shelley's populism remain in their different ways feats of ventriloquism.

Their stylistic experiments serve to indicate a general awareness that by 1819 English politics had assumed a new character. The central political issues were no longer debated by individuals who differed in their views but shared a common language. Burdett and Cobbett both argued for a reform of parliament, but the antagonism between them was more implacable than that between, say, Burdett and George Canning. They differed in the language that they used, and difference in language had superseded difference in policy as the critical indicator. Byron and Shelley, however much the latter might try to mend himself, shared the language common to those who had enjoyed a "classical education." This is why, of course, a Tory critic such as Lockhart could admire their poems despite his dislike of their politics, but find nothing in the poetry of Hunt and Keats that did not inspire him to contempt. His aesthetic sense could transcend difference of opinion, but could not rise above difference of class.

Keats's modern critics have been right to insist on restoring the political import of Keats's poems, but they have not been very much more successful in locating that import than Keats's reviewers, and for the same reason. The attempt has been to deduce from the poems a set of political opinions; to read "To Autumn" as guiltily retreating from thoughts of the ill-fed weavers and millhands who assembled at Manchester into a visionary world of pastoral opulence, or alternatively as incorporating a system of allusions to Peterloo which places Keats firmly "on the liberal side of the question." Such readings do not so much straitjacket the poems as dress them in a jacket remarkable for being so neatly reversible.⁴⁹ The political resonance of Keats's poems has its origin not in their opinions but in their style, which is to say, not in their liberalism but in their cockneyism. It is through their style that the poems occupy the "neither/nor" position that defined Keats's class, and it is the very indeterminacy of that particular social class, its unfixed medical position, that enables the poems to express the new politics of the years between 1816 and 1819. This new politics was characterized less by a conflict of opinion than a conflict between languages, between styles. Keats's poems do not take a side in that conflict; rather they accommodate it, and in doing so they expose more clearly than was possible for Byron or Shelley the politics of "England in 1819."

Notes

¹ Current interest in the political significance of Keats's poems originated with Jerome J. MacGann's 1979 article, "Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism," The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 12-65; rprt. from MLN 94, 5 (December 1979): 988-1032. It was further developed in a special edition of Studies in Romanticism, "Keats and Politics: A Forum," SiR 25, 2 (Summer 1986): 171-229, and culminated in two book-length studies and a volume of essays: Daniel P. Watkins, Keats's Poetry and the Politics of the Imagination (London: Associated Univ. Presses, 1989); Marjorie Levinson, Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); and Nicholas Roe, ed., Keats and History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), hereafter cited as KH.

² John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), 2:244. Subsequent citations to Letters appear parenthetically in the text by volume and page number.

³ G. M. Matthews, ed., introduction to Keats: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 1-37, 2.

⁴ Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), p. 366; hereafter cited as JK.

⁵ Vincent Newey makes the strongest possible case for the political import of the poem, offering it as "a critique of society," but even in this reading it does not appear to be a critique either powerful or pointed. See Newey, "Keats, History, and the Poets," in KH, pp. 165-193, 169.

⁶ Quoted in William Keach, "Cockney Couplets: Keats and the Politics of Style," SiR 25, 2 (Summer 1986): 182-96, 184.

⁷ Keach, pp. 184-5.

⁸ Hunt continued to tinker with The Story of Rimini until 1844. Quotations are taken from the first edition (London: John Murray, 1816). In this edition the lines are not numbered.

⁹ Hunt presumably derives his word from the verb "jaunce," which describes the prancing of a horse, but "jauntiness" already carried its modern sense (OED, s.v. "jauntiness").

¹⁰ Hunt, preface to The Story of Rimini, pp. vii-xix. The quotations are from pp. xv-xvi. Subsequent page references will appear parenthetically in the text.

¹¹ William Wordsworth, preface to Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems (1802), William Wordsworth: The Poems, ed. John O. Hayden, vol. 1 (New York: Penguin, 1982), pp. 867-96, 869.

¹² Wordsworth, p. 870.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ J. G. Lockhart, signing himself "Z," "The Cockney School of Poetry, No. II," Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 2, 8 (November 1817): 194-201.

¹⁵ In both poems the husband detects the crime when the wife speaks endearments to her lover in her sleep.

¹⁶ William Hazlitt, "On the Qualifications Necessary to Success in Life," in The Plain Speaker, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930-4), 12:195-209, 208.

¹⁷ See Bate, The Stylistic Development of John Keats (New York: Modern Language Association, 1945).

¹⁸ Samuel Bamford published his first volume of verse, The Weaver Boy, in 1819. Keats seems to have been irked that Bamford was, like himself, given the advantage of Hunt's benevolent patronage in The Examiner.

¹⁹ Levinson, p. 5.

²⁰ Keats, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," in The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 1978), p. 64, line 7.

²¹ Morris Dickstein, "Keats and Politics," SiR 25, 2 (Summer 1986): 175-81, 180.

²² Alan Bewell, "The Political Implication of Keats's Classicist Aesthetics," SiR 25, 2 (Summer 1986): 220-9, 229. Bewell' s conclusion, that "Keats's inability to speak in an assured political voice . . . represents an identification with those anonymous groups whose political voice cannot yet be heard in either poetry or English politics" (p. 229), is less convincing. It comes close to taking Keats for a "weaver boy."

²³ Lockhart as "Z," "The Cockney School of Poetry, No. IV," Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 3, 17 (August 1818): 519-24, and J. W. Croker, unsigned review, Quarterly Review 19, 37 (April 1818, although this issue was, in fact, published in September): 204-8.

²⁴ Thomas A. Reed, "Keats and the Gregarious Advance of Intellect in Hyperion, " ELH 55, 1 (Spring 1988): 195-232, 195.

²⁵ Croker, p. 206.

²⁶ Lockhart, "Cockney School, No. IV," p. 522.

²⁷ Bate, JK, p. 131.

²⁸ Keats, Hyperion: A Fragment, in The Poems of John Keats, pp. 329-56, bk. 1, line 189. Subsequent citations will be to this edition and appear parenthetically by book and line number.

²⁹ Bate notes that fifty-eight percent of the lines in the first two books consist of dialogue (JK, p. 391).

³⁰ Michael O'Neil shares my suspicion of the poem's inability "to believe full-bloodedly in a liberal, optimistic version of history," but would rather deny that this failure is "class-motivated." For him, it is a product of Keats's dawning recognition of the inevitable difference between imaginative and political value. See O'Neill, "'When this warm scribe my hand': Writing and History in Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, " in KH, pp. 143-64, 153.

³¹ Lockhart, "Cockney School, No. IV," p. 519.

³² Keats, The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, in The Poems of John Keats, pp. 478-91, canto 1, lines 11-2. Subsequent references will be to this edition and appear parenthetically by canto and line number.

³³ Lockhart, "Cockney School, No. IV," p. 522.

³⁴ Bate, JK, p. 590. Bate extended and generalized his belief that Keats suffered from a sense of belatedness in The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 1970), which Harold Bloom acknowledges as supplying the germ of The Anxiety of Influence and its successors.

³⁵ K. K. Ruthven, "Keats's Dea Moneta," SiR 15, 3 (Summer 1976): 445-59, 448 and 449. Levinson comments that Ruthven "does not do very much in a critical vein with his mythographic findings," only to agree that "there's not a great deal to do" (p. 257). She goes on to use Ruthven's perception in her discussion of Lamia, not The Fall of Hyperion. Watkins is unique in insisting on the complexity of Moneta's dialogue with the poet, a dialogue in which the poet is "belittled and maligned while at the same time being rewarded" (p. 168), and allowing that recognition to control his response to the poem. My difference with Watkins is that, in the end, he reads the poem as an allegory in which Moneta is the embodiment of the "marketplace" that is the governing power of Keats's world. The marketplace values poetry only as a "product" that functions to absorb the contradictions inherent in a capitalist society and to "soothe the frustrations of the alienated" (p. 169). Such a reading grants Keats a stable, ironic understanding of the poet's naiveté, establishing him as the authoritative analyst of his own cultural and historical predicament. See Watkins, pp. 156-76.

³⁶ Lockhart, "Cockney School, No. IV," p. 519.

³⁷ Lockhart, "Cockney School, No. IV," p. 520.

³⁸ Lockhart, "Cockney School, No. IV," p. 524.

³⁹ Compare Lockhart: "It is a better and wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to 'plasters, pills, and ointment boxes,' &c." ("Cockney School, No. IV," p. 524).

⁴⁰ Ruthven, p. 450.

⁴¹ Keats, "Chapman's Homer," line 1.

⁴² Bate, for example, insists that lines 187-210, the lines in which Moneta denies the poet's title to the name of poet, should not be regarded as a part of the poem on the sole authority of a single memorandum by Richard Woodhouse: "'Keats seems to have intended to erase this and the next twenty-one lines'" (quoted in Bate, JK, pp. 599-600). But it is easy to understand Woodhouse's response as an attempt to save his friend from supplying, even after his death, ammunition of the kind that hostile critics had shown themselves so ready to use. Woodhouse would have had bitter memories of the critical response to the preface to Endymion. Stillinger seems right to argue that Woodhouse's note has the status of a "critical conjecture" rather than a record of an authorial decision. See Stillinger, The Texts of Keats's Poems (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974), p. 262.

⁴³ McGann, p. 53.

⁴⁴ See Geoffrey Hartman, "Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats's 'To Autumn,'" The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 124-46; McGann, pp. 48-65; Keach, pp. 192-6; Roe, "Keats's Commonwealth," in KH, pp. 194-211.

⁴⁵ In 1818 William Cobbett published an English grammar addressed to "Young Persons," and "more especially" to "Soldiers, Sailors, Apprentices and Ploughboys." Cobbett's design is to challenge the monopoly of literacy claimed by those who had enjoyed a classical education, and hence to challenge the monopoly of political power to which, they claimed, their education entitled them. On Cobbett's Grammar, see Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791-1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 239-48.

⁴⁶ Lord Byron to John Cam Hobhouse, 22 April 1820, "Between Two Worlds," 1820, Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, vol. 7 (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 1977), pp. 80-2, 81.

⁴⁷ On the topicality of Marino Faliero, see Malcolm Kelsall, Byron's Politics (Brighton, England: Harvester, 1987), pp. 89-109.

⁴⁸ Mary Shelley, quoted in Shelley: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. G. M. Matthews (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 270-4, 272.

⁴⁹ See Susan Wolfson's introduction to "Keats and Politics: A Forum," SiR 25, 2 (Summer 1986): 171-4. Wolfson contrasts George Bernard Shaw's appreciation of Keats's attack on the "avaricious capitalism" of the brothers in Isabella; or the Pot of Basil with John Scott's distaste for Keats's "'school-boy vituperation of trade and traders'" (pp. 172, 173). It is clear to me that Scott is offended not, as Wolfson would have it, by a proto-Marxist radicalism, but by what he takes to be an affected, genteel contempt for trade and traders. Again, one finds that the same passage offers itself to a reversible political understanding.