Byron's satire of Robert Southey's Vision of Judgment, a Poet Laureate elegy and political settling of scores, upends Southey's Tory preening with liberal political satire, but also supplements this anti-type with unexpected twinning, especially against the unnamed figure of pure principle, the pseudonymous Junius.

She was 68, he was 24. Both hit the winter of 1812 with poetic heat that radiated into a future bereft of British self-recognition, importance and supremacy.

That the language of ‘domestic affections’ and ‘home’ has a much wider register, and ideological reverberation, than a reference to any immediate domicile and family is reflected everywhere in Lyrical Ballads, localised in rural districts though its poetry and prefaces may be. In 1790, Edmund Burke excoriated the French Revolution’s degradation of home and domestic affections in historical and national terms. He celebrated the antithesis to new France in traditional England, where ‘conservation’, ‘transmission’ and ‘inheritance’ of ‘property’ operate on one ‘principle’, founded on the ‘method’ and ‘pattern of nature’. The Burkean state endures as a family settlement, ‘a permanent body composed of transitory parts’, a home for national domestic affection beating ‘in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world’.

My chapter takes our old friend Southey as a new “context” for Byron: not the well-known target of satiric abuse, but in surprises of sympathy, as an accidental muse for Byron’s voice. This may seem ultra-counterintuitive for the famous butt of brutal, hilarious Byronic ridicule. The debut was English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (begun October 1807, published 1809): hailing the poet of ponderous Epics (CPW I: 230, l. 25), the relentless Ballad-monger, the plodding long-winded Bard (CPW I: 231–3, ll. 86–118). Southey wasn’t the lone star in the abuse. It was a constellation, including Lakers Wordsworth and Coleridge. The irritation of Wordsworth’s poetry was sharpened in the Regency for Byron by Wordsworth himself, his Tory-turn thanked with a patronage post. As for Coleridge, Byron apologized in 1815 for the “pert, petulant, and shallow” satire in English Bards (BLJ 4: 286), and stayed true to the best of the poet. Coleridge would stand by his Lordship in the Byrons’ separation scandal of 1816, with an essay in the April 18 Courier (unsigned, the author was legible to Byron). Rapt by the “pathos and tenderness” of Byron’s “Fare Thee Well” to Lady Byron (privately circulated, quickly pirated), Coleridge defended its “touching and affecting” verses against charges of “affectation” and “hypocrisy.” Byron had helped him financially, supported his playwriting, and persuaded John Murray (his own publisher) to issue a slim volume of Coleridge’s poetry. This came out in May, leading with Christabel, the poem Wordsworth rejected, years ago, for Lyrical Ballads. Byron had read it in manuscript and praised it in an endnote in The Siege of Corinth (1816, 56). After it was roasted in the reviews, he defended it vigorously to Murray and others (BLJ 5: 108). Among them was Thomas Moore (BLJ 5: 150), whom Byron nudged for a favorable notice in the Edinburgh Review. Moore obliged, but hardly with favor (ER 27, September 1816, 58–67). When in 1819 Byron drafted a satirical “Dedication” of Don Juan to Southey, he let Coleridge off with a friendly jest just about his prose: “Explaining metaphysics to the nation – / I wish he would explain his Explanation” (DJ, Dedication, II. 15–16).

First looking

Keats seems wired to write poetry in discovery, turning themes, allusions, and formal traditions (stanzas, couplets, meters) into workouts with what he's been reading, has in his head, feels on his pulses. At the same time, he was acutely sensitive to the cultural warfare and social gate-keeping impinging on his vocational passion. Here he was in the summer of 1816, without parents but with good friends, counselors, and sponsors; without a university education and connections, but qualified for a career as a general medical practitioner. In October, he passed his apothecaries examination. But he cast his lot with poetry, wanting to join this company of men. This was the month he wrote his first really great poem, spurred by a transformative event of reading a man's vigorous epic, his sonnet, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.

Clarke had on loan a gorgeous 1616 folio edition of George Chapman's late sixteenth-century translation, and was eager to share it with Keats. They stayed up all night with it. Their excitement played off the eighteenth century gold standard, Alexander Pope's Homer, which Clarke also laid out, for comparisons. Here's one passage – Pope's Odysseus, tempest-tossed and shipwrecked, staggering towards land:

You can see Pope's technical precision: strong masculine rhymes, mostly regular iambs with measured medial pauses, the syntax fit to the line. Only “no more / Perform'd” runs over, with a nice pause at the end of suggest not just weak but destroyed knees.

Late poems

Keats lived what he called a “posthumous existence” – not just in his sad last days in Rome but under such a shadow from early years on that even first poems come across as late-minded. A sonnet from January 1817, beginning “AFTER dark vapors have oppress'd our plains / For a long dreary season, comes a day / Born of the gentle SOUTH,” concludes its sweet catalogue of vernal promise with “a Poet's death.” In another untitled sonnet, written as he was finishing Endymion (31 January 1818), Keats renders that peculiar genre of pre-posthumous epitaph:

The sonnet is imprinted with the temporal urgencies of Shakespeare's Sonnet XII (“When I do count the clock that tells the time”) and the echo in Milton's Sonnet XVI (“When I consider how my light is spent”), both fated for a reckoning volta (turn). But Shakespeare turns the count outward (“Then of thy beauty do I question make”), and Milton's When cues “patience to prevent / That murmur” (but not before seven lines).

Contest, test, trial

“I stood tip-toe” closes in a relay of mirrorings: a moon-enchanted poet conceives a moon-raptured shepherd conceiving a mythic shepherd (Endymion) beloved by a Moon-goddess. All are inspired poets, with Keats in the production-line. The worldly genesis of Endymion: A Poetic Romance (the longest poem he'd ever write, ever publish) was a compact made in spring 1817 with Hunt and Shelley to see who could finish a 4,000-line poem by the end of the year. With Poems just out, Keats was eager for a major project. He wrote through 1817, had proofs by the next winter, and a publication at the end of April 1818 – the only one of the three to succeed.

He was doubly energized: A Poetic Romance was not only a venture into a promising genre but also keyed to Keats's romance of being “a Poet.” “As to what you say about my being a Poet,” he wrote to George, and Bailey,

In vocation as well as theme – visionary imagination with an erotic vibe – Endymion would be a test of length and strength, a work of invention that would prove Keats's poetry to the world. In the “old tale” (4.786), a young man's dreams of a Moon-goddess end in his being “Ensky'd” (778) with her – its “felicity” (782) an embodiment of Keats's “favorite Speculation” to Bailey: “we shall enjoy ourselves here after by having what we call happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tone and so repeated” (K 70).

But let me laugh awhile, I've mickle time to grieve: The Eve of St. Agnes

– so sighs old beldame Angela, accessory to a young knight's romantic adventure on a winter night (XIV). As if in recoil from the exhaustion of Hyperion, Keats found himself writing The Eve of St. Agnes in late January 1819, on a vacation from London, during which he may have had a light romantic affair. Its Spenserian stanzas are at once homage to The Faerie Queene (The Eve has a medieval décor) and a display of intricate poetic skill. Its nine lines rhyme ababbcbcc are iambic pentameter (a ten-syllable line), except for the final line, which is a hexameter (six iambs). The rhymes are artfully interwoven, with two opportunities for making the most of couplet rhymes (for close relations of sound and sense) and with the final line offering an opportunity for medial caesura (a pause in the syntax half way through). Keats is also mindful of a spectacular modern-retro site of this stanza, Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, A Romaunt (1812), which turned the stanza into an energetic serial extravaganza. Childe Harold Canto III appeared in 1816 and Canto IV, the last, in 1818, each installment an astonishing success. “I was surprised to hear from Taylor the amount of Murray the Booksellers last sale – what think you of £25,000? He sold 4000 coppies of Lord Byron,” Keats writes to George and Georgiana in February 1819, about Canto IV. Having this news from his own publisher must have been hard, especially in tandem with the report, “I have not gone on with Hyperion” (L 2:62). What Keats could go on with was “new romance” – not only from aptitude but also on the pulse of the market.

The Eve of St. Agnes summons a rather severe history: this patron saint of young virgins was a thirteen-year-old Christian martyr (fourth century), saved by a miracle of storm and lightning from a brutal sentence of gang rape in the brothels on the eve of her execution.

“The poetry of earth is never dead,” wrote Keats in the dead of winter. Let's say the same about the poetry of John Keats (1795–1821). It flourishes in edition after edition, on the walls of libraries and reading rooms, in book titles and popular songs, and in phrases we all know: “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever” “tender is the night” “alien corn” “Beauty is truth; truth Beauty” “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” “fanatics have their dreams.” What if this talented young man had had the means to attend a university? He would have been a star student: vigorously underlining and annotating, eager to talk about his reading, rereading constantly, and probably petitioning for an interdisciplinary program in literature, philosophy, and medicine. Keats was a voracious reader, lived in books he said, had read Hamlet forty times (from his ease of reference, it's clear he had much of Shakespeare by heart). His letters bristle with his reading, not only in reports but in their very metaphors, figured as books, passages, and reading itself (“dark Passages” the heart as a “horn-book”). He began writing poetry in his teens, with Imitation of Spenser (he read the entire Faerie Queene, a feat few professors today may claim); one of his first publications was a sonnet written after an all-nighter with George Chapman's 1616 translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. To firm up his vocation, he sat down to reread Shakespeare's fiercest tragedy, King Lear – and wrote a sonnet on this event, too. Keats's poetry often pivots on events of reading – by turns, passionate, careful, interpretive, skeptical. Great literature, Keats knew, is intellectual vigor with aesthetic complexity, and it always rewards concentrated reading.

Keats-the-reader is also a critical rereader, and the lively density of his own poetry repays such attention. In Reading John Keats I attend to the actions of Keats's language and to how these activate our reading. Reading John Keats provokes us to reflect on what it is to read, fail to read, misread, reread, read better.