John Keats and the Culture of Dissent

This book overturns received ideas about Keats as a poet of `beauty' and `sensuousness', offering a compelling account of the political interests of Keats's poetry and showing why his poems generated such a bitterly hostile response from their first critics. It sets out to recover the vivacious, pugnacious voices of Keats's poetry, and seeks to trace the complex ways in which his poems responded to and addressed their contemporary world. Roe offers new research about Keats's early life which opens valuable and often provocative new perspectives on his poetry. This book offers a completely new account of Keats's schooldays, opening a fresh perspective on both his life and his poetry.Two chapters explore the dissenting culture of Enfield School, showing how the school exercised a strong influence on Keats's imaginative life and his political radicalism. Imagination and politics intertwine through succeeding chapters on Keats's friendship with Charles Cowden Clarke; his medical career; the `Cockney' milieu in which Keats's poems were written; and on the immediate controversial impact of his three collections of poetry. The author deftly reconstructs contexts and contemporary resonances for Keats's poems, retrieving the vigorous challenges of Keats's verbal art which outraged his early readers but which have been lost to us as Keats entered the canon of visionary romantic poets.