Reading Keats, Thinking Politics: An Introduction (John Keats) (Critical Essay‪)‬

MARKING THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM, THIS special issue, "Reading Keats, Thinking Politics," revisits the topic of a collection that appeared midway into the journal's history. Published in Summer 1986 under the guest-editorship of Susan Wolfson, "Keats and Politics" brought together two terms that seemed to present an improbable conjunction. Wolfson cannily observed in the introduction "the general critical tendency" at that time "to regard the very conjunction of 'Keats' and 'politics' as something of a metaphysical conceit." (1) According to long-held assumptions about the relationship between literature and politics, Keats appeared to be the pre-eminently apolitical or even anti-political Romantic poet, the dreamer who evaded topical issues and whose well-wrought productions aspired to a realm of timeless beauty. Since the 1980s, the conjunction of "Keats" and "politics" has served effectively to catalyze a number of diverse critical approaches. Presenting a collection of exciting new work, this issue invites scholars and critics to re-engage with how Keats's poetry is related to questions of politics. The 1986 issue was responding most immediately to the new historicist reading of Keats's poetry as escaping or suppressing its political context. This perspective had been most visibly and powerfully spelled out in Jerome McGann's 1979 essay, "Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism." McGann's most stringent critique focused on "To Autumn," which he argued "is an attempt to 'escape' the period which provides the poem with its context, and to offer its readers the same opportunity for refreshment." (2) The politics that the new historicism found in Keats's poetry was its "(politically) reactionary" denial of "context," which McGann defined as "the Terror, King Ludd, Peterloo, the Six Acts, and the recurrent financial crises of the Regency" (53, 61). From this perspective, the categories of text and context, literature and politics, and poetry and history presented an intractable and ideologically suspect divide.