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Brian Rejack &Michael Theune

Pages 283-299 | Published online: 05 Apr 2022

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• https://doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2022.2043587
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ABSTRACT

Keats’s final volume of poetry is justly celebrated for its longer narrative poems—the title poems and the fragment of Hyperion included at book’s end—and for the odes which remain vastly influential examples of lyric high seriousness. However, at the same time that Keats was preparing his book for publication in late 1819 and early 1820, he was also writing a longer narrative poem that wouldn’t make it into print until 1848: The Cap and Bells. This work was the last major poetic project on which Keats labored before he died, but even so, it remains remarkably understudied. Our essay attempts a reframing of Keats’s final book by reading it back through the lens of his “faery tale’s” satire. We do so by posing a mental experiment: what if the final poem of the 1820 volume had not been Hyperion but rather The Cap and Bells? By exploring this possibility, we aim to amplify the undertones of, and so engage more fully, the 1820 volume’s humor and playfulness.

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Notes

1 The sentences quoted here come from Woodhouse’s assessment of Keats’s proposed revision to the final stanza of The Eve of St. Agnes. In responding to Woodhouse and sharing in his opinion, Taylor displays his distaste for a Don Juan-esque passage of Lamia that Keats had sent him in a letter and which would not make it into the poem’s published version.

2 On the circumstances surrounding Hyperion’s inclusion in the 1820 volume, see Stillinger’s Poems of John Keats (640, 736–37). See also White (24–29).

3 For a compelling recent answer to the question of why Keats twice gave up on his epic, see Igarashi’s “Keats’s Ways.”

4 Harold Bloom in The Visionary Company refers to Hyperion as Keats’s “first attempt at mature epic” (381, our emphasis). Anne K. Mellor notes that Keats turns to his revisions in The Fall “eager to complete a mature epic statement of his beliefs” (225–26). Even when “maturity” is not the precise metric at work, the Hyperion poems often feature as the culminating examples in book-length studies of Keats, as is the case in several recent examples including Porscha Fermanis’s John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment (2009), Shahidha Kazi Bari’s Keats and Philosophy: The Life of Sensations (2012), and William A. Ulmer’s John Keats: Reimagining History (2017).

5 Turley briefly mentions The Cap and Bells and remarks, “Personally, I do not see the rupture deplored by Motion, Bate, and others, which The Cap and Bells is supposed to represent in terms of the authorized ‘plot’ of Keats’s development towards poetic apotheosis” (7).

6 All citations to Keats’s poetry are to Poems. Parenthetical citations are to poems’ line numbers, and, as in the case of Hyperion, any Book, Part, or Canto designations preceding the line numbers.

7 White’s “dozen features of Propriety” (following a formulation Keats uses in his 10–11 May 1817 letter to Benjamin Robert Haydon) include “Enchantment and Disenchantment”; “Dreams and Visions”; “Loss”; “A Word: ‘Adieu’”; “A Poetic Reference: Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’”; “Antithetical States”; “Dialectic and Paradox”; “Beauty and Truth”; “Associational Imagery”; “Links from Poem to Poem”; “‘Stitching’ Imagery”; and “Toward Melancholy” (37–59).

8 Martin Halpern’s discussion of The Cap and Bells notes that the fairy tale’s cross-species play may parody some of Keats’s earlier work, including Lamia and “Ode to Psyche” (82). However, Halpern attends most closely to Keats’s parodic allusions to Endymion.

9 See Cox (who cites Stuart Curran’s similar earlier point) on this progression with respect specifically to variants of romance in the volume’s three opening tales (56–57).

10 On the connections between physical transport and affective responses to reading, see Burgess.

11 Jeffrey Robinson has written extensively about the “poetry of the Fancy,” which, by the early-nineteenth century, named an aesthetic principle associated with the “whimsical, playful, trivial, physical, sexual, and popular”; he notes that “poetry of the Fancy” was ultimately rooted in a commitment to “the seriousness of play” (11).

12 John Barnard recognizes this connection, along with a handful of other moments from The Cap and Bells that signal “self-parody of Keats’s own work” (712).

13 See Andrew Bennett’s Keats, Narrative and Audience for an overview of some earlier attempts at sorting out the allegorical possibilities of Lamia, and for his reading of the Lamia/Lamia/lamia slippage (172–78).

14 On the “Man-Tiger-Organ” (and its connection with British imperialism), see Mann and Jones.

15 In Brown Romantics, Manu Samriti Chander reads Keats’s camelion poetics in relation to Homi Bhabha’s notion of mimicry, such that Keats’s imitativeness “opens up a space from which to critique the association of Romantic originality with Englishness” (96). By voicing part of the critique in The Cap and Bells through Eban, Keats offers a form of chameleonic mimicry closely linked with colonial subjugation and resistance (albeit refracted through the lens of a fairy tale).