John Keats Reimagining History
This book considers Keats’s major poems as exercises in Romantic historicism. The poetry’s rich allusiveness represents Keats’s effort to reclaim the British canon for Cockney revisionism, and reveals Keats characteristically invoking the past to define h
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William A. Ulmer
John Keats Reimagining History
William A. Ulmer University of Alabama Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-47083-2 ISBN 978-3-319-47084-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47084-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017930400 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover design: Fatima Jamadar Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
PREFACE
John Keats: Reimagining History originated as an attempt to understand the literariness of Keats’s poetry. Even if intertextuality is a feature of most culturally ambitious poetry, the traditionalism of Keats’s work had long struck me, as it has others, as especially pronounced and significant—an attribute implicated in his sudden stride to greatness, a clue to the fundamental way he imagined. And I had long been dissatisfied with reigning conceptions of poetic influence, which framed it as a dark agon over poetic priority, an idea that seemed melodramatic and unconvincing even in the case of a poet willing, at least in one phrase in one letter, to associate Milton and death. My Keats is subject merely to passing moods of intertextual or class anxiety. His retentive memory resulted in phrases from his reading coming unbidden during the process of composition. But he invoked the British literary canon so persistently as he wrote because his writing represented a conscious effort to reclaim the canon for the alternate cultural and political values that he and his fellow Cockneys endorsed; so I came to believe and so this study contends. It should come as no surprise, then, that I depend on the important scholarship done on Leigh Hunt’s
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