SOURCE: "Cockney Couplets: Keats and the Politics of Style," in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 25, No. 2, Summer, 1986, pp. 182-96.

[In the essay that follows, Keach examines the couplets of Keats ' Poems and Endymion as politically charged Cockney insurgences.]

The focus of this paper—Keats's couplet writing in the Poems of 1817 and in Endymion of 1818—may seem less than inviting if you take the dim view of this poetry that still prevails. But the conspicuous influence of Leigh Hunt, together with the Tory attacks on Keats's "Cockney style" largely provoked by that influence, make it possible to reconstruct a more detailed political context for this poetry than for any other text or moment in Keats's career. I should acknowledge straightaway that the political implications of Keats's "Cockney style" have been recognized before by (among others) John Hayden, Theodore Redpath, and most recently Jerome McGann.¹ What I want to do is explore one aspect of those implications more intensively, speculating along the way about the difficulties as well as the possibilities of doing so. And I want to suggest that whatever you think about the couplets in Sleep and Poetry or Endymion, the critical questions they encourage aren't entirely dissolved in Keats's later stylistic achievements. McGann is right, I think, to say that "the significance of this Cockney style . . . is not very widely recognized,"² especially (I would add) its significance for Keats's own subsequent development.

In late July 1818, on a visit to Scotland, Benjamin Bailey dined at the house of Bishop George Glieg, his future father-in-law, and there met John Gibson Lock-hart, one of the main contributors to the new magazine recently founded by the Tory publisher and bookseller William Blackwood.³ In August, Bailey wrote to Keats's new publisher, John Taylor, about this meeting:

[Lockhart] abused poor Keats in a way that, although it was at the Bishop's table, I could hardly keep my temper. I said I supposed then [Keats] would be attacked in Blackwood's. He replied "not by me"; which would carry the insinuation he would by some one else. The objections he stated were frivolous in the extreme. They chiefly respected the rhymes.⁴

As it turned out, of course, Lockhart—and possibly his cohort John Wilson—did attack Keats in Blackwood's Magazine, in the last of a series of abusive articles begun in October 1817 on the "Cockney School of Poetry." For "Z," as the Blackwood's reviewers signed themselves, Keats's rhyme in his 1817 and 1818 volumes wasn't a frivolous matter at all. It epitomized the corruption of what Blackwood's called "the Cockney school of versification, morality, and politics":

. . . this romance is meant to be written in English heroic rhyme. To those who have read any of Hunt's poems, this hint might indeed be needless. Mr Keats has adopted the loose, nerveless versification, and Cockney rhymes of the poet of Rimini.⁵

Lockhart's implication is clear: Keats's loose liberal couplets are the stylistic analogue of the loose liberal politics he had imbibed from Hunt. Near the end of the review Lockhart quotes twenty-two lines (exactly half of them enjambed) from Keats's denunciation of those "who lord it o'er their fellow-men / With most prevailing tinsel"⁶ at the beginning of Book III of Endymion. He introduces this quotation by saying: "We had almost forgotten to mention, that Keats belongs to the Cockney School of Politics, as well as the Cockney School of Poetry."⁷

The same linking of politics and versification marks John Wilson Croker's attack on Endymion in the arch-Tory Quarterly Review:

—At first it appeared to us, that Mr. Keats had been amusing himself and wearying his readers with an immeasurable game at bouts-rimés. .. . He seems to us to write a line at random, and then he follows not the thought excited by this line, but that suggested by the rhyme with which it concludes. There is hardly a complete couplet inclosing a complete idea in the whole book.⁸

For Croker, Keats's Cockney couplets are an affront to the orthodoxy of the closed Augustan couplet and to the social and moral traditions it symbolizes. Croker's reference to the game of bouts-rimes, although it doesn't exactly fit the compositional process he thinks he sees in Keats, is politically significant. Addison had defined the game in attacking its eighteenth-century vogue in one of his Spectator essays (No. 60) on forms of "False Wit": "They were a List of Words that rhyme to one another, drawn up by another Hand, and given to a Poet, who was to make a Poem to the Rhymes in the same Order that they were placed upon the List."⁹ That this game was still fashionable in Regency society is evident from Byron's delightfully macaronic couplet in Canto 16 of Don Juan, where we hear about the Duchess of Fitz-Fulke's taste in poetry: "But of all verse, what most ensured her praise / Were sonnets to herself, or 'Bouts rimés'" (St. 50).¹⁰ In accusing Keats of playing at bouts rimés, Croker insinuates that this low-born London "neophyte" of Leigh Hunt is abusing Pope by taking seriously a parlor game with which his aristocratic betters merely while away their time on country weekends. Like Blackwood's "Z," Croker ridicules other features of Keats's Cockney style as well: the meter, the diction, the erotic imagery. But it is the "Cockney rhymes" that most obviously betray what these Tory reviewers see as Keats's inseparable poetical and political vices.

Keats was caught up, then, in a squabble between Tory traditionalists, for whom the balanced and closed Augustan couplet had become something of a cultural fetish, and the liberal reformers who set out to establish "a freer spirit of versification," as Hunt says in the Preface to The Story of Rimini,¹¹ along with a freer society. So far this picture of the politics of Keats's "Cockney style" seems to be fairly predictable—but that's because it's still misleadingly simple.¹² Consider, for instance, the political ramifications of Hunt's developing the couplet, not blank verse, as an antithesis to what he saw as the monotonous regularity of "Pope and the French school of versification" (Preface, The Story of Rimini). Hunt's effort to reform the heroic couplet is an exact image of his reformist politics. There is a general formulation in Hunt's essay "What is Poetry?" that could characterize his ideal society almost as easily as his ideal couplet: "Poetry shapes this modulation into uniformity for its outline, and variety for its parts, because it thus realizes the last idea of beauty itself, which includes the charm of diversity within the flowing round of habit and ease."¹³ Hunt loves "the flowing round of habit and ease" that marks the couplet as long as it is internally varied, diverse. And there is an undeniably conservative impulse in his desire, as he says in the Preface to the second edition of The Feast of the Poets, "to bring back the real harmonies of the English heroic, and to restore to it half the true principle of its music,—variety."¹⁴

But there may also be a specifically political anti-conservative impulse in Hunt's—and initially Keats's, before the unCockney Miltonic experiments of the first Hyperion—avoidance of blank verse. For by 1817-1818, blank verse had come to be inevitably associated with Wordsworth, whose political conservatism Hunt frequently criticized even as he made efforts to align himself with Wordsworth's power as a poet of nature.¹⁵ We should note in this regard that when the Blackwood's review defends Pope against Keats's attack on "rocking Horse" couplets in Sleep and Poetry, it does so by proclaiming that "to deny [Pope's] genius, is just as absurd as to dispute that of Wordsworth, or to believe in that of Hunt."¹⁶ Hunt and Keats may not have shared Shelley's judgment that the author of The Excursion was "a slave"¹⁷ (Shelley himself countered The Excursion in Alastor by taking on its verse form as well as its argument), but their staying away from blank verse may have had a political motivation all the same. It was in the summer of 1818—the summer of the Black-wood's and Quarterly Review attacks—that Keats tried to visit Wordsworth at Rydal Mount, only to hear that he was out campaigning for the Tory Lowthers against the reformer Henry Brougham in the Westmoreland elections.¹⁸

While Keats praises Wordsworth in that section in Sleep and Poetry on the current state of English verse, he does so as part of a performance that suggests anything but a writer naive about or unaware of the politics of style. It's not just that 28 of the 49 lines in these two verse paragraphs are enjambed, in open defiance of the closed couplets savored by the likes of Croker. At several points Keats's couplets mock by mimicking the poetic conventions under scrutiny:

with a puling infant's force
They sway'd about upon a rocking horse,
And thought it Pegasus. Ah dismal soul'd!

(185-87)

The rhythm of "They sway'd about upon a rocking horse" rocks childishly along in satirical harmony with the rhyme ("infant's force"/"rocking horse"), and then comes to an abrupt halt at the medial full-stop after "And thought it Pegasus."¹⁹ Keats knew what he was about in attacking Pope's couplets with couplets of his own devising:

But ye were dead
To things ye knew not of,—were closely wed
To musty laws lined out with wretched rule
And compass vile: so that ye taught a school
Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit,
Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit,
Their verses tallied. Easy was the task:

(193-99)

Here Keats flouts the "wretched rules" of Augustan verse formally as well as argumentatively by refusing to pause grammatically for four consecutive line-endings (the doubly unstopped "rule"/"school" couplet is an act of open unruliness)—until he moves into the mincing steps of "to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit," where he prosodically parodies the process he names. It was shrewd of Byron, in what would have been the first of his contributions to the "Pope controversy," to attack Keats's attack on Pope by referring sarcastically to Mr. Keats's "new 'Essay on Criticism.'"²⁰ Byron recognized Keats's polemical exploitation of making "The sound . . . seem an Echo to the sense" (Essay on Criticism II.365), and he knew that Keats learned to do that sort of thing from Pope himself.

Byron's response to Keats's parody of Pope's couplets suggests just how complicated and even contradictory the politics of style can become. He first mocks Keats's mockery in "Some Observations upon an Article in Blackwood's Magazine," a rambling piece written in March 1820 and sent to Murray for immediate publication (Murray held it back, however, and did not publish it until 1833).²¹ The Blackwood's article in question, published in August 1819, had nothing directly to do with Pope—it was a moralizing denuncation of Byron's private life as reflected in Don Juan. Byron thought the Blackwood's piece to have been authored by John Wilson,²² who the previous summer had very likely collaborated in the attack on Hunt and Keats. So Byron's initial denuncation of Keats's writing appears as part of his assault on the same Tory magazine that had first derided Keats's "Cockney rhymes." The ironic political crossings get even more intricate. Byron dedicated his unpublished "Observations" to Isaac Disraeli, who just four months later defended Pope in a long review of two competing editions of Joseph Spence's Anecdotes and of William Lisle Bowles's The Invariable Principles of Poetry in The Quarterly Review,²³ which had of course published Croker's savaging of Endymion. It was Disraeli's review that elicited Byron's first public entry into the "Pope controversy" (the first, that is, since English Bards and Scotch Reviewers). "They support Pope I see in the Quarterly," he wrote to Murray. "Let them Continue to do so. . . ."²⁴ In his Letter to**********[John Murray] . . . on the Rev. W. L. Bowles's Strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope (March 1821), Byron sides openly with the Quar-terly's position in the "Pope controversy." In his Second Letter on the same subject (also written in March 1821 but not published until 1835), Byron has another go at Keats (or "Ketch," as he now calls him)—this time as part of a condescending dismissal of "my friend Leigh Hunt" and what "some one has maliciously called the 'Cockney School.'"²⁵

Byron's willingness to side with the Tories in the "Pope controversy" against the liberal poetics of Hunt and Keats reflects interestingly on the politics of his own couplet style. As Peter Manning has recently shown in two excellent articles on the political context and significance of The Corsair,²⁶ Byron's writing appealed strongly to reformist and even to radical readers. Conrad's "anti-authoritarian" and "anarchic" behavior led to his being invoked as the type of Jeremiah Brandreth, one of the leaders of the Pentridge uprising of June 1817, and to a popular prose adaptation of The Corsair by the radical publisher William Hone. Byron himself had indicated his own ties to the reformist Whigs in the dedicatory letter to Thomas Moore which prefaced the first edition of The Corsair in 1814. By referring to "The wrongs of your own country" and "the magnificent and fiery spirit of her sons,"²⁷ Byron reaffirms his passionate appeal for Catholic emancipation in his second speech before the House of Lords (21 April 1813).²⁸ At the same time, as Manning demonstrates, there was much about The Corsair that contradicted its oppositional implications and made it appeal to conservative bourgeois readers: the volume's expensive production, the learned epigraphs and notes, the urbane authorial voice adopted in those notes and in the letter to Moore—and the versification, which Byron advertises as "the best adapted measure to our language, the good old and now neglected heroic couplet."²⁹

The couplets of The Corsair provide a striking contemporary contrast to Keats's Cockney couplets in Sleep and Poetry and Endymion. Enjambment is rare; only two lines in the poem's opening 42-line section, for example, aren't strongly end-stopped. Croker could have found in Byron's couplets just what he missed in Keats's: "a complete couplet inclosing a complete idea." And the relation between couplet form and idea in The Corsair is politically suggestive. Consider the couplet that begins the opening song of Conrad's pirates: '"O'er the glad waters of the dark blue sea, / Our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free,'" (1.1-2). Conrad and his followers may have "thoughts" that are "boundless" and "souls" that are "free," but the couplet which celebrates this spirit is neither—it is as carefully bound-ed and closed as a couplet from The Essay on Man. An even more arresting instance of the way in which Byron's heroic couplets check—and also give contrasting point to—the poem's appeal to a restless, rebellious energy appears later in this opening section, as the pirates distinguish their lives on the open sea from "him who crawls enamoured of decay": '"While gasp by gasp he faulters forth his soul, / Ours with one pang—one bound—escapes controul.'" (1.31-32). "Escapes controul" comes sharply up against the controlling closure of a full-stop. Manning's work on The Corsair helps us see that however anti-authoritarian and anarchic Byron's hero may be, he performs within stylistic terms as familiar and congenial to genteel Regency readers as Keats's Cockney couplets were strange and rebarbative.

Keats knew what he wanted to do in his 1817 Cockney couplets, and he knew how far beyond the "flowing round of habit and ease" characteristic of Hunt's liberal reform couplets he wanted to go. The Blackwood's review is right, given its basic assumption, to assert that "the defects of [Hunt's] system are tenfold more conspicuous in his disciple's work than in his own."³⁰ Tenfold may be an exaggeration, but anyone interested in the statistical evidence for just how much further Keats went than Hunt in breaking the metrical and grammatical conventions of the Augustan couplet can look such evidence up in the studies of M. R. Ridley and W. J. Bate.³¹ Hunt himself had complained about the excesses of Keats's couplet experiments in his Examiner review of the 1817 Poems:

Mr. Keats' . . . fault, the one in his versification, arises from . . . contradicting over-zealously the fault on the opposite side. It is this which provokes him now and then into mere roughness and discords for their own sake, but not for that of variety and contrasted harmony.³²

Keats's friend John Hamilton Reynolds had made much the same complaint a few months earlier in his unsigned review for the progressively liberal Champion (9 March 1817).³³ In fact the liberal reviewers, though quite favorably disposed towards Keats's early poem, had almost as many reservations about the couplets as their Tory counterparts. P. G. Patmore in The London Magazine (April 1820) praised the "freedom, sweetness, and variety" of Keats's rhythms in Endymion but admitted that "the verse frequently runs riot, and loses itself in air."³⁴

Such responses ought to make us ask to what extent, and in just what ways, the stylistic choices and performances of the 1817 and 1818 volumes are political choices and performances. The broad relevance of a highly politicized context to Keats's early style is clear, but no one would want to argue that his extravagant experiments in couplet writing are in themselves expressive of political convictions more radical and anarchic than those of liberals like Hunt. If anything, Keats's stylistic extravagance might appear to be radically anti-political in its tendency to produce lines which, as Hunt said in 1832 of the more disciplined couplets of Lamia, "seem to take pleasure in the progress of their own beauty."³⁵ We seem to have arrived at a point where the explanatory usefulness of the political context for Keats's early couplet style breaks down. Or perhaps both that context and Keats's stylistic response to it are only complicating themselves beyond the level at which we usually work when we look at what McGann refers to as "the specific ways in which certain stylistic forms intersect and join with certain factual and cognitive points of reference."³⁶

As a way of pushing on speculatively at this point, I want to turn to another moderately liberal reviewer, Francis Jeffrey, writing belatedly about Endymion in the August 1820 number of The Edinburgh Review. Jeffrey sees that if Keats is playing at bouts rimés in the couplets of Endymion, he is doing so in a distinctive and at least potentially fruitful way:

A great part of the work indeed, is written in the strangest and most fantastical manner than can be imagined. It seems as if the author had ventured every thing that occurred to him in the shape of a glittering image or striking expression—taken the first word that presented itself to make up a rhyme, and then made that word the germ of a new cluster of images—a hint for a new excursion of the fancy—and so wandered on, equally forgetful whence he came, and heedless whither he was going, till he had covered his pages with an interminable arabesque of connected and incongruous figures, that multiplied as they extended, and were only harmonized by the brightness of their tints, and the graces of their forms.³⁷

Some of Jeffrey's response is vaguely generalizing, but the part that's worth holding onto for the moment is the suggestion that Keats allows himself to be led (and also misled) by the rhyme as it generates a need for connection and development, as it provokes and then gives unexpected shape to figurative elaborations. At times in Endymion and in the 1817 volume, Keats seems to be doing just this, and with an air of self-delighting curiosity as to the consequences. There is an extraordinary moment in "I Stood Tip-toe" when Keats wanders off into a day-dream occasioned by the couplet that precedes it:

Were I in such a place, I sure should pray
That nought less sweet might call my thoughts away,
Than the soft rustle of a maiden's gown
Fanning away the dandelion's down:

(93-96)

He follows this figure for four more couplets before reluctantly letting her depart:

And as she leaves me may she often turn
Her fair eyes looking through her locks aubùrne.
What next? A tuft of evening primroses,
O'er which the mind may hover till it dozes;

(105-8)

The genial audacity of that "What next?" is winning in its way—it's hard not to read it as Keats's exclamation about having gotten by with a rhyme like "turn"/"aubùrne," as well as an indication that he is letting himself be surprised by what turns up next.

The serious critical issue here is the extent to which Keats is willing to let the pressures and possibilities of rhyming, and thus of contending with arbitrary phonetic and semantic convergences, shape the development of his poem. Is this an issue with political implications, amenable to historical and political understanding? Or have we passed beyond the level at which politics and form intersect? It's one thing to accept, say, P. N. Medvedev's principle that "A linguistic form is only real in the concrete speech performance, in the social utterance,"³⁸ or David Simpson's insistence "on the historical grounds of [a] play of possibilities rendered into language."³⁹ It's quite another to make good on McGann's claim that "Only by reading [Keats's Cockney poetry] in a sharply specified historical frame of reference are we able to see . . . and hence to describe precisely not merely the abstract characteristics, but the felt qualities of its poetic structure."⁴⁰ Some of those "felt qualities," as we have seen, yield amply to being understood "in a sharply specified historical" and political "frame of reference." But what about the quality Jeffrey felt in observing that Keats often allows the first rhyme-word in a couplet to become "the germ of a new cluster of images—a hint for a new excursion of the fancy"?

One initial response to these questions ought to be that they can't be settled theoretically, simply as points of principle. The degree to which historical and political circumstances are precisely useful in understanding matters of style, or the level at which they cease to become useful, isn't decidable in advance of our actually trying to think about a particular stylistic feature from a historical and political point of view. With this in mind, I want to look briefly at rhyme-induced figurative "excursions" from Keats's later poetry. That such "excursions" grow out of the sort of verbal opportunism in Keats's "Cockney style" that upset Tory and liberal reviewers alike was demonstrated years ago by Kingsley Amis, in the inaugural volume of Essays in Criticism. Amis complained that Keats's "hopelessly inadequate" rhyming of "my sole self and "deceiving elf' in the last stanza of "Ode to a Nightingale" has its origin in one of the Cockney couplets of Endymion, when the narrator laments "The journey homeward to habitual self! / A mad-pursuing of the fogborn elf (II.276-77).⁴¹ Readers more interested than Amis apparently was in Keats's broodings about the self as a construct at once deceiving in its significance and yet hauntingly persistent may find that the rhyming precipitation of "elf out of "self (it's like a miniature of Blake's "spectre" and "emanation"), far from being "hopelessly inadequate," is intrinsic to Keats's thinking through the issue of poetic subjectivity. His attitude towards the self, as reading Hazlitt helps us see, is implicitly political in deep and complicated ways. Instead of trying to draw those implications out within the confines of this paper, however, I want to turn to another example which raises more immediate questions about the politics of style and impinges directly on the debate provoked by McGann's political reading of "To Autumn."

Here are the last seven lines of the poem's opening stanza, beginning with the second of that stanza's opulent infinitive clauses:

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

(5-11)

In this stanza of "To Autumn," where all is made to feel so inevitable, we feel an inevitable resistance to recognizing that anything as overtly arbitrary as the exigencies of rhyme could be involved in generating that culminating image. Yet the "bees" in "their clammy cells" are there in part to rhyme with "cottage-trees" and "hazel shells." And these very rhymes appear in Endymion, in Cockney couplets like the ones attacked by Blackwood's and the Quarterly:

Just when the light of morn, with hum of bees,
Stole through its verdurous matting of fresh trees.

(111.419-20)

And gather up all fancifullest shells
For thee to tumble into Naiads' cells,

(1.271-72)

It's plausible to think that Keats was led to the "cluster of images" that concludes the first stanza of "To Autumn" by, among other concerns, the suggestive pressure of rhyme, and by his recalling his own Cockney versification. But is there anything political about his being thus led?

As David Bromwich points out, Keats had already used a reference to bees to distinctive political effect in "Robin Hood" (1818), where it is followed in rhyming position by an aggressively Cockney couplet linking "honey" to "money." We know from a letter to Bailey shortly after his moving to Winchester that however pleased Keats may have been with this quiet retreat into solitude, the class-based slurs on his Cockney writing were still very much in his mind: "One of my Ambitions is . . . to upset the drawling of the blue stocking literary world" (14 August 1819).⁴² And as both Bromwich and Paul Fry remind us, Keats was avidly keeping up with the current political turmoil in the country. He had gone back to London from Winchester for a few days (to try to arrange financial help for his brother George in America) just in time to see Orator Hunt's tumultuous return from Manchester and Peterloo. The Examiner's reports on Peterloo, which Keats read during his Winchester stay, provide a dark backdrop to the "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" celebrated in "To Autumn." The number for Sunday, 5 September—the last number Keats would have seen before his trip to London—contains a particularly important linking of the month's political and literary significance. Following a series of letters reporting on the aftermath of Peterloo, including letters from Henry Hunt himself on his Manchester trial, and immediately following a piece entitled "Return of the Killed and Wounded at Manchester. Letter from Mr. Pearson," is an entry called "Calendar of Nature. (From the Literary Pocket-Book.) September." This item begins with the September stanza from the procession of the months in Spenser's Mutability Cantos (The Faerie Queene VII.vii.38), a stanza that contains iconographical details to which Keats was clearly responding in "To Autumn."⁴³ Even more suggestive, however, are the details in the Examiner's gloss on Spenser's stanza:

The poet still takes advantage of the exuberance of harvest and the sign of the Zodiac in this month, to read us a lesson on justice.

Autumn has now arrived. This is the month of the migration of birds, of the finished harvest, of nut-gathering, of cyder and perry-making. . . . The swallows . . . disappear for the warmer climates, leaving only a few stragglers behind, probably from weakness or sickness. . . .

September, though its mornings and evenings are apt to be chill and foggy, and therefore not wholesome to those who either do not or cannot guard against them, is generally a serene and pleasant month, partaking of the warmth of summer and the vigour of autumn. . . . The feast, as the philosophic poet says on a higher occasion . . .⁴⁴

Here the Examiner quotes a Spenserian stanza from Shelley's The Revolt of Islam (Hunt's extended enthusiastic review of the poem had appeared in February and March 1818) describing a victory feast held by the forces of liberation. The stanza is slightly misquoted to make it fit with the Examiner's prose:

The feast is such as earth, the general mother,
Pours from her fairest bosom, when she smiles
In the embrace of Autumn. To each other
As some fond parent fondly reconciles
Her warring children, she their wrath beguiles
With their own sustenance; they, relenting, weep.
Such is this festival, which from their isles,
And continents, and winds, and oceans deep,
All shapes may throng to share, that fly, or walk, or creep.

(v.lv.2209-2307)

Is this Autumn's "lesson on justice," this image of a momentary natural bounty that "beguiles" the "wrath" of people previously oppressed? Hunt had not quoted the stanza in his review of Shelley's poem, but his summary of this phase of the narrative is pertinent: "a festival is held at which Cythna presides like a visible angel, and every thing seems happiness and security. The Revolters however are suddenly assailed by the allies of the tyrant; and the fortune of the contest is changed."⁴⁵

All this contextual material may seem remote from Keats's bees in "To Autumn," but the Examiner's quoting of Shelley suggests one way in which it may be pointedly relevant. When in his "Song to the Men of England" (1819) Shelley asks the "Bees of England" why they allow "these stingless drones" to "spoil / The forced produce of your toil" (the "spoil"/"toil" rhyme, incidentally, appears in the stanza from Spenser quoted in the Examiner), he is drawing upon a figurative tradition common in radical political writing of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century.⁴⁶ True, Keats's imagery has an important Virgilian source, as editors have pointed out: even the rhyme-word "cells" has its antecedents in the "celias" of Virgil's famous simile.⁴⁷ But knowing this doesn't preclude our thinking politically about Keats's image. After all, Virgil's early summer image ("aestate nova") of Dido's subjects joyfully laboring to build Carthage has complicated political resonances of its own, resonances carried over but transformed in Keats's early autumnal image of worker-bees whose momentary abundance makes them "think warm days will never cease" (my emphasis), and whose "o'er-brimm'd . . . cells" are disturbingly "clammy." A reader in 1819-1820 familiar with popular political pamphlets and songs might have found Keats's image of laboring bees political in ways that no blue stocking would have approved of.

I'm not arguing that all references to bees in romantic poems ask to be read politically, or that Keats's stylistic habits led him deliberately to focus his own and his readers' attention in these lines on the living conditions of real English gleaners in the autumn of 1819. But I am arguing that here as elsewhere, "To Autumn" presents us with an idealized, mythologized image of culminated and therefore death-set fruition that fends off but cannot finally exclude a negative historical actuality which Keats was certainly in touch with. His writing cannot free itself entirely from either the political reality or the political language that both McGann and Fry, in opposite ways, insist that he wants to avoid.

My larger point is that even at a level of performance where the specific political context of Keats's Cockney couplets ceases to be immediately instructive, the stylistic instincts encouraged and shaped by that context may produce writing with an important though momentarily suppressed political dimension. If our engagement with the "richer entanglements" of Keats's poetry is going to expand to include a fresh sense of that political dimension, we will need to make ourselves newly alert to the ways in which acts of writing and reading may be subject to historical and political circumstances quite remote from a poem's immediate field of reference.

Notes

¹ John O. Hayden, The Romantic Reviewers, 1802-1824 (London: Routledge, 1969) 188-96; Theodore Redpath, The Young Romantics and Critical Opinion 1807-1824 (London: Harrap, 1973) 418-21; Jerome McGann, "Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism" MLN 94 (1979): 996-99.

² McGann, "Keats and the Historical Method" 996.

³ Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U P, 1963) 366-67.

⁴The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers 1816-1878, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U P, 1948) 1: 34.

⁵ "Cockney School of Poetry, No IV," Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 3 (August 1818): 522.

⁶ All quotations are from The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U P, 1978).

⁷ "Cockney School of Poetry" 524.

⁸ "Art. VII.—Endymion: A Poetic Romance. By John Keats," The Quarterly Review vol. 19, no. 37 (April 1818): 205-6.

⁹The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965) 1: 256.

¹⁰ All quotations of Don Juan are from Byron's "Don Juan": A Variorum Edition, ed. Truman Guy Steffan and Willis W. Pratt (Austin: U of Texas P, 1957).

¹¹ (London: J. Murray; W. Blackwood; Cumming, 1816) xv. Subsequent quotations are from this edition. In "The Return of the Enjambed Couplet" (ELH1 [1940]: 239-52, Earl Wasserman argued that Hunt's and Keats's originality in opening up the closed Augustan couplet had been exaggerated, that "the versification of Keats and Hunt is .. . the fulfillment of a movement that had its beginnings in the last quarter of the eighteenth century" (251).

¹² We need to remember here that a majority of the reviewers of both Keats's early volumes were encouraging. See Hayden, The Romantic Reviewers 188, 190.

¹³ "An Answer to the Question What is Poetry? Including Remarks on Versification," Imagination and Fancy (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1845) 2.

¹⁴ (London: Gale and Fenner, 1815) 32.

¹⁵ See P. M. S. Dawson, "Byron, Shelley, and the 'new school,'" Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference, ed. Kelvin Everest (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes, 1983) 89-108, esp. 91-101.

¹⁶ "Cockney School of Poetry" 520.

¹⁷Mary Shelley's Journal, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1947) 15.

¹⁸ Bate, John Keats 349-50.

¹⁹ Douglas Bush notes that the source of Keats's image here is Hazlitt's "On Milton's Versification" (1815): "Dr. Johnson and Pope would have converted his [Mil-ton's] vaulting Pegasus into a rocking-horse" (John Keats, Selected Poems and Letters [Boston: Houghton, 1959] 312).

²⁰ "Some Observations Upon an Article in Blackwood's Magazine," Appendix IX in Byron's Works: Letters and Journals, ed. Rowland E. Prothero (London: John Murray, 1898-1901) IV: 493.

²¹ See note 20 above and Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1957) II: 845 and note.

²² Prothero, Letters and Journals IV: 474, refers to Byron's letter to Murray of 10 December 1819 (see IV: 385 and note in Prothero's edition). Leslie Marchand, Byron's Letters and Journals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U P, 1976) VI: 257n. says, "It is still a question as to whether John Wilson wrote the review."

²³ Vol. 23, no. 46 (July 1820): 400-34.

²⁴Byron's Letters and Journals VII: 217 (4 November 1820). Bowles's own preference for the open, enjambed couplet is an aspect of the "Pope controversy" that doubtless exacerbated Byron's antipathy to Bowles as it did his antipathy to Keats. See Wasserman, "The Return of the Enjambed Couplet" 248-49.

²⁵ Prothero, ed., Letters and Journals Appendix III, V: 588.

²⁶ "Tales and Politics: The Corsair, Lara, and The White Doe of Rylstone," Salzburger Studien zur Anglistik und Amerikanistik 13 (1980): 204-30; and "The Hone-ing of Byron's Corsair," chapter 6 in Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. Jerome McGann (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985) 107-26.

²⁷ Quotations of The Corsair are from vol. III of The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981). The references to Byron's Preface are on 111: 148.

²⁸ See Manning, "Tales and Politics" 209.

²⁹Complete Poetical Works 111: 149.

³⁰ "Cockney School of Poetry" 522.

³¹ M. R. Ridley, Keats' Craftsmanship: A Study in Poetic Development (London: Methuen, 1903) 241-49 and 305, Note J, and Walter Jackson Bate, The Stylistic Development of John Keats (New York: Humanities, 1945) 19-28, 147-55.

³² 6 and 13 July 1817, reprinted in Redpath, The Young Romantics and Critical Opinion 455-56.

³³ Reprinted in Redpath, The Young Romantics and Critical Opinion 451-52.

³⁴ Vol. I, no. 4: 383.

³⁵The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt (London: Edward Moxon, 1832) xxxvi-xxxvii.

³⁶ "Romanticism and its Ideologies," SiR 21 (1982): 576.

³⁷The Edinburgh Review vol. 34, no. 67 (August 1820): 204-5.

³⁸ P. N. Medvedev/M. M. Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1978) 122. This passage is quoted by McGann in "Keats and the Historical Method" 990.

³⁹ "Criticism, Politics, and Style in Wordsworth's Poetry," Critical Inquiry 11 (1984): 67.

⁴⁰ "Keats and the Historical Method" 996-97.

⁴¹ "The Curious Elf: A Note on Rhyme in Keats," EIC 1 (1951): 189-92.

⁴²The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U P, 1958) 2:139.

⁴³ Helen Vendler emphasizes the influence of the Mutability Cantos on "To Autumn" in The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U P, 1983) 242-43. She mentions the September stanza in passing but says nothing about its appearance in The Examiner.

⁴⁴ No. 610 (5 September 1819): 574.

⁴⁵ No. 527 (1 February 1818): 76.

⁴⁶ See P. M. S. Dawson, The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980) 50-51. The quotation is from Shelley: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, corrected by G. M. Matthews (Oxford: Oxford U P, 1970).

⁴⁷ References are to Aeneid 1.430-36 in the Loeb Classical Library edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U P, 1934).