Consuming Keats: Nineteenth Century Re-Presentations in Art and Literature

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Consuming Keats Nineteenth-Century Representations in Art and Literature

Sarah Wootton

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Consuming Keats

10.1057/9780230598492 - Consuming Keats, Sarah Wootton



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Nineteenth-Century Representations in Art and Literature Sarah Wootton



Consuming Keats

© Sarah Wootton 2006

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–1913–7 ISBN-10: 1–4039–1913–5 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wootton, Sarah. Consuming Keats : nineteenth-century representations in art and literature / Sarah Wootton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1–4039–1913–5 1. Keats, John, 1795–1821—Criticism and interpretation—History—19th century. 2. Keats, John, 1795–1821—Appreciation—Great Britain. 3. Keats, John, 1795–1821—In literature. 4. Keats, John, 1795–1821— Illustrations. 5. Keats, John, 1795–1821— Influence. 6. Keats, John, 1795–1821—In art. I. Title. PR4837.W66 2006 821′.7—dc22 2005044665 10 15

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All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.


‘Sweets to the sweet’ For Marez





List of Plates

viii

Acknowledgements

x

Introduction

1

1 Keats’s Posthumous Life of Elegy

12

2 Pre-Raphaelite Visions of Keats’s Poetry

42

3 Rossetti’s Influence on Keats’s Posthumous Reputation

78

4 Keats’s Belle Dame as Femme Fatale

107

Appendix 1: Thomas Hall Caine, ‘John Keats’

146

Appendix 2: Robert Browning, ‘Popularity’

147

Appendix 3: Christina Rossetti, ‘On Keats’

150

Appendix 4: Alice Meynell, ‘On Keats’s Grave’

151

Appendix 5: A. C. Swinburne, ‘In Sepulcretis’

153

Appendix 6: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘John Keats’

155

Appendix 7: Oscar Wilde, ‘The Grave of Keats’, ‘Endymion’ and ‘The Garden of Eros’

156

Appendix 8: Thomas Hardy, ‘At the Pyramid of Cestius Near the Graves of Shelley and Keats’

164

Appendix 9: Thomas Hall Caine, ‘To OMB’

165

Appendix 10: Ella Wheeler Wilcox, ‘The King and the Siren’

166

Appendix 11: Tony Harrison, ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’

168

Notes

171

Bibliography

199

Index

211 vii



Contents

1 Joseph Severn, Keats Reading at Wentworth Place. 1821. National Portrait Gallery, London

4

2 William Holman Hunt, The Eve of St Agnes. 1848. National Museums Liverpool (The Walker)

47

3 John Everett Millais, Isabella and Lorenzo. 1849. National Museums Liverpool (The Walker)

50

4 William Holman Hunt, Lorenzo at his Desk in the Warehouse. 1848–50. Photo RMN/© Gérard Blot

56

5 William Holman Hunt, Isabella and the Pot of Basil. 1867. Laing Art Gallery (Tyne and Wear Museums)

60

6 John Melhuish Strudwick, Isabella. 1879. © Christie’s Images Ltd (2006)

64

7 Daniel Maclise, Madeline After Prayer. 1868. National Museums Liverpool (The Walker)

66

8 John Everett Millais, The Eve of St Agnes. 1863. The Royal Collection © 2006, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

67

9 Jessie Marion King, Isabella. 1907. Reproduced by courtesy of Dumfries and Galloway Council and the National Trust for Scotland as copyright holders in the work of Jessie M. King. By permission of the British Library

73

10 John William Waterhouse, Isabella. 1907.

75

11 Thomas Hall Caine. Manx National Heritage

83

12 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Mnemosyne. 1881. Delaware Art Museum, Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial Collection

91

viii



List of Plates

List of Plates

94

14 John William Waterhouse, La Belle Dame sans Merci. 1893. Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt

119

15 Frank Dicksee, La Belle Dame sans Merci. 1902. The Bridgeman Art Library, London

121

16 William Russell Flint, La Belle Dame sans Merci. 1908. National Museums Liverpool (The Walker)

123

17 Jessie Marion King, La Belle Dame sans Merci. c.1902. Reproduced by courtesy of Dumfries and Galloway Council and the National Trust for Scotland as copyright holders in the work of Jessie M. King. By permission of the British Library

128


129


130

20 Frank Cadogan Cowper, La Belle Dame sans Merci. 1926. The Bridgeman Art Library, London

132



13 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, La Belle Dame sans Merci. c.1855. The British Museum

ix

This book would not have been written without the invaluable advice of Professor Jacqueline Labbe. I am indebted to the staff of the English Studies Department at Durham University, especially my mentor Dr Pam Knights. Many thanks to Professor Michael O’Neill for his generosity and continued belief in me as a teacher and a researcher. Thanks are due to the staff of the English Literature Department at the University of Sheffield: in particular, the late Dr Ian Mackillop, for encouraging my interdisciplinary interests, and Professor Sally Shuttleworth, for her assistance in securing funding for my postgraduate studies. Thanks, also, to my external examiner, Professor Leonée Ormond, and the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, particularly Duncan Wu and Angus Graham-Campbell, for their recognition of my early research on this topic. This book would not have been feasible without the studentships and grants awarded by The British Academy. I am most indebted to my family and friends for their help and encouragement. Sincere thanks to my parents and grandparents for their unfailing support. My sister, Victoria Dowd, first awakened my interest in art and literature, and this book is a tribute to her intelligence and unconditional love. I cannot give thanks enough for the times spent with her and Kev. The selflessness and invaluable technical assistance of my partner, Toby Watson, sustained me through the completion of this book – ‘I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth.’ Revised sections of Chapter 2 have been published in ‘Ghastly Visualities: Keats and Victorian Art’, in The Influence and Anxiety of the British Romantics: Spectres of Romanticism, edited by Sharon Ruston, and in ‘Keats in Early Pre-Raphaelite Art’, Keats-Shelley Review, 12. Permission has been granted by The Edwin Mellen Press and Keats-Shelley Review to reprint relevant material. Tony Harrison’s poem ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’ is reproduced with the kind permission of the author © Tony Harrison (Selected x



Acknowledgements

Poems, Penguin, 1987). I am also grateful for permission to reproduce images in this book. Thanks to: The Bridgeman Art Library; The British Library; The British Museum; Christie’s Images Ltd; Delaware Art Museum, Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial Collection; Dumfries and Galloway Council and the National Trust for Scotland; Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt; Laing Art Gallery (Tyne and Wear Museums); Manx National Heritage; National Museums Liverpool (The Walker); National Portrait Gallery, London; Photo RMN/© Gérard Blot; The Royal Collection © 2006, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Every effort has been made to locate copyright holders. If any have inadvertently been overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make appropriate arrangements at the first opportunity.



Acknowledgements xi




A man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory1 Who is Keats? Is he ‘recoverable’, or do critics inevitably reinvent the poet in line with the preoccupations of the present? What factors affect our approach to, and appreciation of, Keats’s life and work? Consuming Keats explores these questions and their implications for Keats’s posthumous existence during the nineteenth century. The focus of Consuming Keats is creative indeterminacy – what Keats conceptualised as ‘Negative Capability’ (c.21 December 1817, original emphasis). Juxtaposing pessimism and potential, negative capability indicates Keatsian traits that have appealed to interpreters, namely ambivalence and contradiction. Keats metaphorically constructed his artistic self as the changeable chameleon poet who slipped in and out of identities. Appropriately, then, Consuming Keats approaches the poet’s afterlife as a series or network of transmutations. We do not inherit the ‘real’ Keats or even a cultural construction, but a multiplicity of economic, poetic, political and sexual selves formed through the perpetual dialogue between past and present. A number of studies, such as Marjorie Levinson’s Keats’s Life of Allegory, probe the internal and externally constructed complexities of this poet.2 Michael Schmidt’s Lives of the Poets acknowledges the various incarnations of Keats as a biographical subject, while Andrew Motion’s life of Keats differentiates between the man, who existed within a socially specific context, and the poet.3 Motion comments on the attraction of Keats as a subject – ‘its fascination is endless; its power to [. . .] inspire is inexhaustible’ – but adds the following caveat: ‘And yet, and yet . . . Keats’s “posthumous existence” has 1



Introduction

Consuming Keats

blurred his “reality” ’.4 Somewhat paradoxically, therefore, Keats’s popular appeal detracts from, or dilutes, representations of his life and work. Despite contributing to the very process he critiques, Motion’s biography sets out to track down and ‘capture Keats whole’ (p. xix). Similarly, William Henry Marquess recognises Keats’s many and varied ‘lives’, the ‘continual allegory’ that constitutes his existence, yet he too searches for ‘the whole man’.5 To a greater or lesser extent, both Motion and Marquess are driven by a desire to write the definitive account of Keats’s life; neither is able to reside in the negatively capable state advocated by their subject. Rather than revere or attempt to reclaim a sacred original, this book argues for a ‘Multiple Keats’, what Jack Stillinger describes as a sort of unresolved imaginative dividedness between the serious and the humorous, the straight and the ironic, the fanciful and the real, the high-flying and the down-to-earth, the sentimental and the satiric, the puffed up and the deflated.6 An analysis of the shifting and precarious positions inhabited by the self is particularly suited to Keats, a man who proclaimed that he had ‘no identity at all’: the poet, Keats said, ‘is not itself – it has no self, – it is every thing and nothing’ (27 October 1818). John Barnard comments on the ‘variety of voices and texts jostling for place’ in Keats’s correspondence.7 Keats is the affable and devoted friend, jealous lover, manic depressive invalid, tortured artist, and marginalised poet, and he adapts each role to suit his addressee in ‘marvellously alive letters [that] are always alert to their recipient’s interests and their relationship to him. They are also highly conscious of the occasions of their own writing’ (Barnard, p. 120). This multifaceted Keats did not begin as a whole that I am preparing to dismember. Alongside a recognition of Keats as an indefinite and indefinable subject, I will be focusing on the many artists and authors who have been inspired by this poet. To explore Keats’s legacy through nineteenth-century poetry, painting and private correspondence is to construct a threefold indeterminacy. Like Andrew Bennett, I view Keats and his work as a convergence of elements creating meaning: ‘the uncertain polarities which generate form out of the sparks which fly from an intense conjoining and unsettling of incommensurable difference’.8 Subsequently, artists and authors from other periods, working with different forms and



2

3

media, interact with this ‘silent music rippling with inference’.9 For Lynne Pearce, interpretation is ‘an act of opposition’, a reading of the past from the culturally loaded perspective of the present: yet artistic representation does not consist of one site of conflict or coalescence but many.10 Representations of Keats in the nineteenth century are tense collaborations forged out of the dissonance between past and present, poetry and painting. Joseph Severn’s 1821 portrait of Keats, the first of many posthumous visual tributes to the Romantic poet, provides an illustrative example (Plate 1). This painting ostensibly captures the subject’s self-portrait as described in a letter to his sister. I must confess even now a partiality for a handsome Globe of goldfish. [. . .] Then I would put it before a handsome painted window and shade it all round with myrtles and Japonicas. I should like the window to open onto the Lake of Geneva – and there I’d sit and read all day like the picture of somebody reading. (13 March 1819) In this painting, Severn has realised Keats’s dream of domestic and poetic harmony, a utopia of literary living. The artist is also preserving an image of Keats as he would prefer to remember him: at Wentworth Place, poised and serene, the archetypal poet amongst his beloved books rather than the fevered consumptive awaiting death. However, it would be naïve to suppose that Severn merely transferred Keats’s prospect view from his letter to a canvas. Within a visual medium, the painter can, for example, create a connection between Keats and Shakespeare – in the portrait hanging above the young poet – without stating his canonical agenda. What is lost, on the other hand, are Keats’s written expressions and the progression of his thoughts, shifting from one idea to another. As the poet himself comments, through words he can exist ‘like the picture of somebody reading’ (my emphasis), whereas a painting fixes the image and thereby curtails Keats’s imaginative freedom. This brief discussion of Severn’s portrait has already raised notable issues of Romantic self-fashioning: the claims of private remembrance and public commemoration; the creative interpretation of the artist; and the various interactions between different media. An analysis of Severn’s painting, along with the previous discussion of life writing, suggests a prevailing practice amongst interpreters of



Introduction

Consuming Keats

Plate 1 Joseph Severn, Keats Reading at Wentworth Place. 1821. National Portrait Gallery, London.

Keats. To employ Shelley’s allegory in ‘Adonais’, the first poetic tribute to Keats, the subject is seen as ‘prey’ to be stalked and hunted down (71).11 When captured – to use Motion’s term for the chase – Keats is reduced to a vacuous entity, an empty space awaiting the semantic imposition of the captor (even within the visual medium of Severn’s portrait, the artist’s signature authors Keats). Other notable approaches to the subject include the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s (PRB) description of Keats as a ‘discovery’.12 Part of a complex strategy of conquest, the Pre-Raphaelites are thrilled by the newness



4

5

of their ‘find’; the malleability of a subject relatively untouched by other interpreters; and the possibility of an economic return. Similarly, Henry Adams outlines the attraction of Keats to his first biographer in terms of discovery and financial gain: ‘Milnes was always unearthing new coins and trying to give them currency.’13 ‘Currency’ denotes ‘a medium of exchange’, and Richard Monckton Milnes’s Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats capitalises on both the economic and the cultural (i.e. ‘the currency of ideas’) connotations of the term (OED). First, author and subject are enriched through sales of the book and an enlarged interest in Keats’s poetry; secondly, Milnes’s version of the poet’s life and work gains ‘general acceptance or circulation’, and thereby establishes his credibility as a writer while also furthering Keats’s credentials. However, this suggests an equally profitable exchange for both parties when the term ‘currency’ only refers to current usage. In effect, Keats is at the mercy of Milnes’s agenda, the biographer’s interpretation of his subject’s life and work. It is pertinent at this juncture to raise the question, why Keats? What made Keats so attractive to nineteenth-century artists and authors? This question will be addressed more specifically where relevant in each chapter, but some generalisations can be made here. Most significantly, Keats denied the authority of a governing self. Offering appetising ‘fragments’ out of which ‘you may make a good wholesome loaf, with your own leaven in it’, Keats invites interpretation and artistic licence (3 May 1818). Amenable to all standpoints, Keats’s personae – both within and outside his poems – are invariably in a state of becoming, poised on the cusp of transformation. This sense of irresolution was compounded by his short life. As Marquess states, ‘virtually everything that we have from Keats’s hand is fresh and immediate, giving the impression of work in progress’, thus inciting writers to complete or fulfil his ‘unachieved potential’ with their own creative projections (Lives of the Poet, p. 15). Keats’s short life also raises the matter of his death. In seeing Keats as ‘prey’ to, or food for, the creative appetites of successive artists and authors, I have situated the subject within a figurative discourse of consumption. Keats became ‘a cultural myth, linking Western Romantic genius with poetry, passion, and consumption’ principally because he personified the contradictions associated with the disease.14 Throughout the nineteenth century, consumption was simultaneously a sign of the creative spirit burning within and the mark of an



Introduction

Consuming Keats

insurrectionist (the sufferer was free from social responsibility due to the fatal nature of the disease).15 In economic terms, TB characterised the outcast, the dissident, a role with which Keats was familiar during his lifetime when he was derided for being the ‘weaver boy’ who aspired to the status of poet (17 September 1819). The sufferer was seen to be indulging in an unregulated spending of vital energies: victims wasted – the Latin term ‘Consumo’ literally means waste away – that which should be conserved. According to Jennifer Davis Michael, TB forced the poet outside the competitive market place where he accumulated the ‘massive debt of illness’, a position Keats was forced to alleviate by accepting the charity of friends.16 Predisposed to consumption in the minds of his contemporaries, Keats obliged by contracting TB. Unsurprisingly, the physical habits of TB sufferers were a social concern in the nineteenth century. The consumptive’s sexual appetite threatened to go unchecked by social deterrents as the law could not punish those who were terminally ill, yet tuberculosis also signified repressed desires eating away the bodily exterior. This was a ‘disease that both attacked and produced refined spirits’ (Bewell, p. 185). In a correspondence that will be discussed in Chapter 3, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Thomas Hall Caine comment on the positive side-effects of Keats’s consumption: the disease purges the poet’s vulgarities – namely his physical attraction to Fanny Brawne – and spiritualises his already near-sacred work. A similar process of moral purification is discernible in Shelley’s ‘Adonais’. The subject exhibits symptoms of consumption whilst simultaneously being freed from physical constraints: he is at once febrile and an ‘aërial’ entity (123). Shelley’s Keats is a sensitive poet who is mercifully released from ‘this mortal coil’ to become an androgynous ‘angel soul’ (154). Elsewhere in the poem, the subject is effeminised through flowerrelated imagery and descriptions of his body such as ‘the silken fringe of his faint eyes’, ‘light limbs’ and ‘weak hands’ (85, 92, 237). As Andrew Epstein comments, this approach ‘“unmans” Keats, robbing him of virility’.17 In one allegory, Keats becomes Echo to Shelley’s Narcissus, legitimating the author’s self-obsession through a mythological guise that renders the subject a female reflection of the author. In Bakhtin’s theory of the Self and Other, the latter component of this creative relation is referred to as (M)Other, a feminine counterpart



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7

that harmonises the inner-workings of masculine inspiration.18 The linguistic composition of M(Other) is unavoidably gendered: yet, as Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock suggest, conceptualising anyone as sign, whatever their sex, not only subordinates but feminises them (recognising the power imbalance that Bakhtin ignores).19 Cherry and Pollock’s essay on Lizzie Siddal as signifier to Rossetti’s signified raises illuminating parallels with Keats’s posthumous existence. As Keats is apportioned the role of an effeminised Echo in ‘Adonais’, so Siddal was defined and denied an independent sexuality by the artistic vision of her notable partner. Siddal became a site of literal and figurative consumption, an object of economic and creative ‘exchange’ for the male artist: on multiple levels, her loss resulted in his gain. Like Shelley in ‘Adonais’, Rossetti emphasised his virility through Siddal’s ailing body and fragile femininity. According to Cherry and Pollock, pulmonary consumption was intrinsically related to gender in the nineteenth century, perceived as a weakness of the feminine body, a representation determined by the ideological suture between female mortality from tuberculosis and femininity as an inferior, tainted, body type. (‘Woman as Sign’, p. 214) Keats’s subordinate role as M(Other) is thereby exacerbated by the social othering of a tubercular femininity.20 As the nineteenth-century female body was perceived as being prone to infection and hysteria, so Keats becomes associated with an infirm body under the constant threat of involuntary convulsions and passionate extremes. Partly accounting for Keats’s appeal to Victorian women, Bewell claims they ‘saw in the poet’s tragedy an image of their own epidemiological fortunes’ (Romanticism and Colonial Disease, p. 186). Integral to the notion of a ‘Multiple Keats’, the poet’s ‘ideological cross-dressing’ has been the subject of many recent feminist studies.21 Friends often remarked on Keats’s ‘womanly’ features, while his poetry, ‘the “flutter” of a feminine sensibility’, found a sympathetic female readership (Bewell, p. 191). Yet, in response to charges of effeminacy, Keats denounced ‘the blue stocking literary world’, thereby aligning his views with those of male traditionalists (14 August 1819). Approaching Keats as a transvestite as opposed to a transsexual, Anne Mellor describes him as a poet who is able to



Introduction

Consuming Keats

occupy ‘the positions of both the female and the male lover’ (in ‘Ode to Psyche’).22 Keats has developed a ‘sexually borderline reputation’, but the extent of his gender ambivalence and the possibilities arising from it are only just beginning to emerge (Najarian, p. 71). Margaret Homans and James Najarian explore the poet’s ‘remarkable fluidity in gender and sexual orientation’.23 Homans discusses how Amy Lowell’s ‘love of women [. . .] came into existence in complex interaction with her reading of Keats’ (p. 322), while Najarian focuses on various nineteenth-century male writers who ‘find their self-definition in their relationships to a poet who was depicted as sexually liminal’ (Victorian Keats, p. 5). Keats evidently has an influential, and as yet relatively unexplored, place in nineteenth-century discourses of homosexuality; moreover, he facilitates an ‘endless variability of gender and sexuality’ (‘Amy Lowell’s Keats’, p. 347). Nearly all the artists and authors I examine in Consuming Keats are men who engage with a male subject. Elegies on Keats admit samesex affinities, and the PRB formed a fraternity through an attraction to this poet. A prominent Pre-Raphaelite, Dante Gabriel Rossetti spent his entire career in homosocial circles that bonded over Keats. Multiple men are simultaneously engaged in the pursuit and possession of this poet, increasing the Self’s or Selves’ hold over the Other. Conversely, Keats is the creative reserve, the source from which all tributes derive. As we shall see throughout this book, artists and authors may represent the subject as an effeminate and diseased victim but, as Bakhtin claims, interpreters only partially inhabit their subject until they are evicted by the next temporary resident. Keats is open to the vagaries of interpretation, yet he withholds the rights of ownership. The Self/Other relation is also affected by external cultural factors, such as Keats’s increasing popularity. As Jennifer Wallace argues, ‘It was impossible, by 1848, to ignore entirely the image of Keats already established’.24 During the course of the nineteenth century, the subject became increasingly resistant to extreme or ‘definitive’ representations that failed to acknowledge the creative continuum of fellow and future interpreters. Even if approached by interpreters as the archetypal, feminised Other, is Keats automatically denied an active role in the creative process? In ‘Patriarchal Thought and the Drive for Knowledge’, Toril Moi proposes a shift away from established binary oppositions in an effort to explore the complex interactions between analyst and



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analysand.25 Is it possible, and indeed desirable, for the critic to revisit the Other as the dynamic, dialogic partner of the Self? Rather than viewing Shelley as Keats’s adversary, can he not be regarded as a creative ally? In Consuming Keats, the various relationships between Keats and his successors do not merely serve as demonstrations of the ‘repressive hypothesis’, but as explorations of the problematic and evolving nature of influence and interpretation.26 As well as instances of parasitic appropriation, artistic representations can also be read as positive affirmations of the subject’s growth, indicators of Keats’s creative value and historic necessity. Chapter 1 of Consuming Keats commences with the birth of Keats’s afterlife. Through an analysis of ‘Adonais’, the rationale behind elegies of Keats becomes apparent: the subject’s death and subsequent decomposition facilitates an authorial recomposition. Shelley’s egoistic elegy determines Keats’s posthumous path throughout the Victorian period. For example, the ‘Shelleyan strategy’ motivates Robert Browning’s mid-century tribute to Keats, ‘Popularity’, in which the subject serves an authorial agenda. However, at this point in the nineteenth century, women poets, such as Christina Rossetti and Alice Meynell, chart new territory in their commemorations of Keats. Gender becomes more than a means of Othering the subject. Seeking both a poetic voice and a sexual identity through Keats, Oscar Wilde’s tributes also depart from the dictates of the male tradition. Rejecting the rivalry usually associated with elegy does, however, carry serious implications; Wilde’s physical desire for the subject and celebration of his verse initiates a recomposition of Keats rather than the living author. The Shelleyan imperative to pursue, possess and ultimately surpass the Other is inverted, thereby effecting an authorial decomposition. The legacy of this Self-less approach is evident in Thomas Hardy’s turn-of-the-century elegy; redefining the relation between a hunter and his prey, the subject now stalks the author. Chapter 1 traces the changing approaches to Keats as an elegiac subject. Concurrent with these developments in poetry is the visual afterlife of Keats. Chapter 2 is not, however, concerned with portraits; like biography, portraiture relies on an interface between fact and fiction, whereas Consuming Keats is concerned solely with creative interpretations of Keats and his work. Fine art is a frequently overlooked, yet vital part of Keats’s posthumous development.27 From the first narrative paintings of the PRB to the countless



Introduction

Consuming Keats

canvases capitalising on market trends, Keats’s poetry was a ubiquitous subject for artists of this period. Stephen Prickett hails Keats as ‘the most potent single influence upon the art of the Victorian era’, which raises the following questions: why was Keats’s poetry so appealing to nineteenth-century artists (particularly the PRB)? And, addressing the issue of medium, how does Keats’s narrative operate within the dimensions of a canvas?28 These concerns will be addressed through the work of two founder members of the PRB, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Chapter 2 will focus on the disparity between the subversive interpretations of Keats’s poems produced during the formative phase of the Brotherhood and the conventionality of later works. As a result of Millais’s and Hunt’s capitulation to market forces, the potential for a provocative artistic interaction was lost. As I will demonstrate, the glut of Keats-based art in the High Victorian period is indicative of aesthetic stagnation and an incestuous, or auto-consumptive, relation to the source. Chapter 3 focuses on the relationship between Keats and another prominent member of the PRB, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Through the analysis of a little-known collection of letters by Rossetti and the Victorian novelist Thomas Hall Caine, a process of redefining Keats’s identity becomes apparent. The overriding objective of these letters, almost one hundred and fifty in total, is an enforced congruity between the subject and a literary standard that both correspondents, most pointedly the ageing Rossetti, aspire to attain. Rossetti refashions the Self through an idealised portrait of Keats’s life and a contrived appreciation of his poetry’s spiritual edification, denying the sensuality or ‘fleshliness’ that initially drew him to the forefather. Most notably, however, the Self/Other dichotomy broadens to admit a third identity – the addressee of Rossetti’s letters. Keats is no longer ‘prey’ to one artistic ego; he is shared amongst friends and colleagues. The subject becomes a malleable literary model that defines identities within a male coterie, a desirable commodity akin to the female Other in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s triangle of gender interrelations.29 It would seem that the locus of power centres on the current interpreters, members of Victorian fraternities who appropriate a single subject. However, Rossetti’s obsessive interest in Keats did not generate the anticipated profusion of creative tributes. Critics have often referred to Keats’s influence on Rossetti’s verse, but one curious fact has not been noted: the artist never produced a finished



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painting based on Keats’s poetry. An analysis of Rossetti’s sketch ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and the incomplete painting ‘Mnemosyne’ will prove instrumental in determining the specific nature of this Keatsian anxiety of influence. The fourth and final chapter examines representations of a single poem, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’. Rossetti’s sketch of Keats’s ballad reveals how the figure of the Belle Dame became synonymous with a misogynistic portrait of the siren that was prevalent throughout the nineteenth century. However, images of the Belle Dame and the siren produced during the fin-de-siècle, turn-of-the-century and the first part of the twentieth century gradually departed from this tradition. Numerous late Romantic painters were attracted to the siren’s transformative character. Her ability to shed chameleonic skins – echoing Keats’s poetic practice – suited artistic needs for mutable modes of expression that accorded with the changing cultural climate. As artists and authors probed deeper into her metamorphic potential, the Belle Dame cast off the restrictive binary oppositions that previously constituted her semantic field of reference. From this perspective, she can be identified with the emerging voice of the ‘New Woman debate’ at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The Belle Dame emerges as an emancipated icon, a tribute to the regenerative abilities of the siren. By contrast, the knight – ‘a symbol of the new vulnerability of the male body’ – personifies degeneration (mirroring the experience of the soldier in the First World War).30 By the 1920s, the Self is dying and the Other is reborn: a complete reversal of the Shelleyan schema. Yet, strangely, even ‘Adonais’ ends with a projected annihilation of Self, prefiguring the appearance of the knight’s corpse in post-war paintings of ‘La Belle Dame’. It appears that a larger cycle is at work, emphasising the ultimate failure of the authoritarian ‘I’ and the continued life of the subject. I will conclude with a brief examination of Keats’s increasing autonomy in twentieth-century interpretations. Departing from previous studies of Keats’s poetic influence and representations of his life in portraits and biographies, this is the first interdisciplinary study to concentrate on the creative legacy of Keats’s work. More broadly, by exploring the dynamics of artistic interpretation, Consuming Keats charts the emergence of the subject from Victorian victim to the victor of modernity.



Introduction

Keats’s Posthumous Life of Elegy

I And shall we mourn, thou Poet of the flowers, That daisies bloom’d above thee ere the hours Of perfect fruitage brought thy riper parts? (Thomas Hall Caine, ‘John Keats’ [1880], 9–11) In his study on the poetic enshrinement of Keats, Jeffrey Robinson postulates: ‘I suspect that no English poet except Shakespeare has occasioned as many celebratory and evocative poems as has Keats.’1 An immediate question arises – why has Keats attracted such a wealth of literary tributes?2 This chapter explores the enduring bond between Keats and elegy from the poet’s death in 1821 to the end of the nineteenth century, while also commenting on the effects of recycling a single subject within this genre. Thomas Hall Caine, whose literary relationship with Keats will be discussed in Chapter 3, imagines the poet as a bud who ‘died in the first flowering of his genius’.3 Keats’s early death and ‘unfulfilled potential’ is the subject of many elegies, yet a prodigious afterlife emerged from these laments. According to Caine, Keats bequeathed his successors a ‘deathless memory’; thus, the past becomes an immortalised presence or, within Caine’s flower analogy, a ‘perennial’ (‘John Keats’, 14: see Appendix 1). Paradoxically, Keats is the ‘poet of death’ and a sustainable source of creative life (Robinson, p. 4). As will become apparent throughout this chapter, both the literal and figurative decomposition of Keats facilitates the recomposition or re-fashioning of the living author. A discourse of consumption 12



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directs Andrew Epstein’s approach to ‘Adonais’, with Shelley receiving sustenance from the deceased: ‘it [“Adonais”] only exists and survives because it is able to grow from and to vanquish the poets that it feeds upon’.4 Commemoration arises out of death, and thereby promotes the opportunism, or even predatory instincts, of the poet.5 As Peter Sacks suggests, an unavoidable aspect of elegy is the ‘poetry contest’ in which the living author fights for the coveted position of true heir to a literary legacy.6 Historically, elegy has been associated with ownership: in Ancient Greece ‘the right to mourn was from the earliest times legally connected with the right to inherit’ (Sacks, p. 37). Accordingly, ‘“Adonais” is about poetic power’ as Shelley attempts to attain ascendancy within a literary genre.7 A number of elegies to Keats, by poets such as Robert Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, also prioritise self-interest over remembrance. Whilst Sacks’s argument accounts for the primary motivation of these poets, a notable part of the elegiac tradition remains outside his framework. Sacks’s approach to this genre is essentially Bloomian – elegists are engaged in a competition with the subject to retain and strengthen their individuality – and thus remains limited to ‘a relationship of sonship’; literary warfare is waged between patriarchs and their male offspring to the exclusion of female counterparts.8 Sacks’s argument does not extend to the women, poets who will be discussed in this chapter specifically Christina Rossetti and Alice Meynell or to Oscar Wilde’s evasion of elegiac rites-of-passage in his Poems of 1881. It is apparent, however, that early elegies to Keats are grounded in a transaction whereby the progeny commemorates his predecessor in exchange for the right to contest poetic primacy. For the first half of the nineteenth century, elegies on Keats are dictated by the interests of the present with only a mercenary regard for the patrimony of the past. An analysis of Keats’s posthumous life in elegy must begin with the original union between subject and genre. Shelley himself stressed the significance of ‘Adonais’, insisting that the work be appreciated by friends and publishers as ‘better in point of composition than anything I have written’.9 Why was the success of this ‘piece of art’ so important to the poet? One answer would be Shelley’s appreciation of Keats, as both a writer and an acquaintance, and his desire to produce a poem ‘worthy of both him and me’ (8 June 1821). However, this explanation ignores the rivalry between the two poets and their mutual desire to retain poetic autonomy.10 As Epstein states, ‘the




Consuming Keats

poets were intensely curious about each other and wary of falling under the other’s influence, Keats being equally sensitive about the issue of poetic independence as Shelley’. The ‘fierce ambivalence’ that Epstein detects in ‘Adonais’ stems from the author’s ‘simultaneous attraction and repulsion’ towards his subject, thereby personifying the conflicting demands of indebtedness and originality (‘Flowers that Mock’, pp. 99, 91, 95, original emphasis). Rather than a tribute to Keats, the estimable heritage of the genre affords a more realistic inducement for Shelley. ‘Adonais’ provides a poetic arena in which an ‘apparently innocent singing match’ is orchestrated to admit Shelley’s succession (Sacks, p. 36). The poet surpasses a host of mourners including his own muse: Urania is roused, ‘Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep’, celebrated, ‘Most musical of mourners’, and dismissed, ‘Death rose and smiled, and met her vain caresses’ (20, 28, 225).11 In terms of the elegiac tradition, Milton is invoked as the third in a triumvirate of literary immortals. He is envisaged at the end of his life, ‘Blind, old, and lonely’, while the description of his death is a poor prefiguration of Shelley’s intrepid journey at the end of ‘Adonais’: ‘he went, unterrified, / Into the gulf of death’ (31, 34–5). After acknowledging the forefather, albeit ambivalently, the final passage of the poem seeks to expel his influence. In retracing the Satanic struggles of Milton’s epic within the form of an elegy, Shelley ambitiously attempts to condense the achievements of both genres within one ultimate moment of poetic transcendence (simultaneously outperforming both Paradise Lost and ‘Lycidas’). Moreover, by invoking the very birth of elegy with his own translations of Moschus’s ‘Lament for Bion’, Shelley strengthens his bid for ‘Adonais’ to be considered the definitive poem in this genre. Intended as a finale, ‘Adonais’ also signalled a beginning with new life rapidly emerging from Shelley’s wake. Within the Victorian period alone, ‘Adonais’ produced a long line of literary offspring: Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Thomas Hardy and A. C. Swinburne are just a few of the poets who acknowledge a debt to Shelley in their tributes to Keats, while Christina Rossetti, Alice Meynell and, to some extent, Oscar Wilde recognise the founder of Keats-based elegies through their conscious separation from ‘Adonais’. One experience that all these authors shared and identified with was Shelley’s conception of the lethal cruelty of critics. Following Shelley’s ‘heroic’ defence of Keats’s unjust death at the hands of



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reviewers, writing a memorial to this martyr enabled each poet to join a consortium of ‘geniuses alienated from an uncomprehending world but mutually supportive of each other’, a fraternal trust of poets voicing despair and anger.12 Our Adonais has drunk poison – oh! What deaf and viperous murderer could crown Life’s early cup with such a draught of woe? The nameless worm would now itself disown. (316–9) Shelley seized upon various accounts of Keats’s ill health and maltreatment by the critics to formulate his own conflated narrative. Even though the poet was aware of an extensive time lapse between the reception of Endymion and Keats’s death, Shelley convinced himself and, more significantly, generations of readers that the ‘rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs’ was in response to reading damning reviews and a ‘rapid consumption’ ensued.13 In short, to use Rachel Falconer’s term for the reinvention of the past, Shelley ‘dis/re/membered’ the sequence of events to vent personal grievances against the Quarterly Review, specifically Southey, and vindicate his own poetry.14 Shelley was able to wrap Keats in a ‘self-invested version of his history’ as no other narrative existed to contest the credibility of ‘Adonais’ and its accompanying Preface (‘Keats Enters History’, p. 37). Until Monckton Milnes’s Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats appeared in 1848, few biographical details emerged apart from recollections by acquaintances.15 Altercations amongst Keats’s friends and relatives, and a lack of public interest in England, dissuaded many candidates from the undertaking. Perpetuating his own perception of the writing Self, a posthumous identity had not yet been formulated for Keats. From such a malleable position, Shelley could easily begin to construct an identity for Keats. The elegiac subject was fashioned into a fatally sensitive writer, a ‘delicate and fragile’ being with a ‘susceptible mind’ (Preface, p. 70). As Susan Wolfson suggests, ‘Shelley projects Keats as the abject other, the helpless victim requiring his defence’ (‘Keats Enters History’, p. 24). Successive elegists thereby inherit a Shelleyan distortion, a received image of Keats as a tragic poet. S. Laman Blanchard cites Keats as an illustration of ‘things not born for worldly strife and pain, / That cannot fade, though doomed perchance to fall’ (‘In Memory of Keats’, 3–4), James Russell Lowell laments the ‘certain doom’ that shrouds the poet (‘To the Spirit of




Consuming Keats

Keats’, 8), and Anne Elizabeth Wilson relates Keats’s poetic talent to his premature end: ‘The waste that youth’s sweet voice must die’ (‘To the Life Mask of Keats’, 23). Robinson suggests that by equating Keats with disease and loss, his entire existence becomes a monument, a life whose meaning derives from death. Keats is therefore defined and represented by his elegiac relevance, which partly accounts for his recurrent appearances in this genre. However, the subject’s suitability for the genre is hard to reconcile with Robinson’s theory of the nineteenth-century Keats as an ‘ended’ poet.16 In terms of his posthumous reputation, ‘Adonais’ had, in the words of one contemporary critic, ‘given life’ to Keats, imparting the ‘salvation and immortality’ that Epstein accuses Shelley of denying his subject (‘Flowers that Mock’, p. 118).17 The transference of loss into gain is an accepted function of elegy and, significantly, a recurring pattern throughout this book: waste – in this instance, the representation of Keats as the poet of death – generates a wealth of tributes. Absence becomes presence but, conversely, Keats’s identity is encompassed within a limiting archetype. The specific subject being commemorated is paradoxically eradicated. The first poetic memorial to Keats commenced a ‘trajectory of anonymity, the transformation of a consciousness into an object’ (Robinson, p. 37). Inherited from Shelley, Browning’s Keats is initially absent from his poem ‘Popularity’; when located, the subject is present only through the image of a crustacean’s shell that ‘locks you safe from end to end’ (‘Popularity’, 8). In one sense, Keats has attained the self-prophesied ‘life of Allegory’, becoming everything and nothing, at once dead and poetically alive: yet this elegiac existence remains devoid of the diversity, the negative capability that he associated with the phrase (18 February 1819). Keats not only appears as the archetypally tragic poet adonais, but is subjected to a series of ‘poetic’ ends. Shelley invents numerous methods of presenting the decaying form of Keats to reaffirm his own existence. As Epstein argues, the elegist necessarily mocks his subject ‘as their own vitality and strength contrasts with the stasis of the deceased’ (‘Flowers that Mock’, p. 111). In ‘Adonais’, Shelley morbidly dwells on death and the decomposition of the ‘leprous corpse’ (172). He lingers on the moment before decay ‘deface[s] / So fair a prey’, and remains enraptured by the ‘merry worm’ disturbing Keats’s ‘cold repose’ (71–2, 176, 180). The threat of violation is imminent in the following



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description: ‘Invisible Corruption waits to trace / His extreme way to her dim dwelling-place’ (67–8).18 Throughout the poem, Keats is fed upon by a host of consumers: disease, time, his own ‘passion-wingèd Ministers of thought’ and invertebrates that live above and below the ground (Southey makes his appearance as an annelid, 74). In addition to these intimate images of decomposition, Keats suffers other forms of abstraction in ‘Adonais’. The subject frequently appears as a metonymical representation with ‘icy lips’ and ‘that mouth’ (105, 101). Evident in these images is Keats’s physicality as the locus of description – he retains the position of tenor in metaphors – but equally apparent is a disturbing trend towards disembodiment (to accompany the dis/re/memberment of Keats’s personal history). As Robinson comments, They [elegists] cast an Ovidean atmosphere over him, a sense of metamorphosis of the harried, passion-burdened person, swamped by financial worries, disease and death, troubled love, hostile reviews, and, thankfully, the love of beauty in all things, into, with his own wasted death, one of nature’s things, a nightingale, a hyacinth. (p. 63) Metamorphosis, ‘a complete change of physical form or substance’, and metonymy, ‘the substitution of a word referring to an attribute for the thing that is meant’, are intrinsically related in Ovid’s myths (OED). The origin of the arts, in the form of a laurel wreath and pipes, sprang from the changed states of Daphne and Syrinx. According to Sacks, these inanimate artefacts represent a substitute, or ‘consolation prize’, and can therefore be compared to Keats as a pair of lips, a flower or a bird.19 These metonyms for loss also represent an afterlife, albeit in the altered states of a tree and reeds, and signify the positive rewards of poetry and music. As Daphne and Syrinx epitomise the transformation of the elegiac subject and symbolise attainment within the arts, so the metonymic parts of Keats in ‘Adonais’ reaffirm the significance of the commemorative object. Each time Keats is the occasion of an elegy he is resurrected, revived and reinvented. In other words, Keats is kept alive by the re/dismembering of his death. Whilst metonymy confirms an elegiac afterlife for the subject, the use of this device in ‘Adonais’ is not always affirmative. Shelley’s




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Consuming Keats

Why didst thou leave the trodden paths of men Too soon, and with weak hands though mighty heart Dare the unpastured dragon in his den? (236–8) The decision to publish Endymion against Shelley’s advice is portrayed as an impetuous act. As a result, Keats cannot be included amongst the ‘men’ who have determined the course of true poethood. He is set aside from his peers and emasculated further by the disembodied hand that cannot fight or, indeed, compose poetry. The subject is rendered inferior to the intended allusion to St George’s bravery, and is equally ineffective against the monstrous foe of the critics. In a subsequent passage, the image of the ‘weak hand’ becomes part of Shelley’s persona as he adopts the role of the ‘frail form’ beside Keats’s grave (295, 271). As Michael O’Neill suggests, ‘He [Shelley] actively inflicts suffering on himself as well as enduring it’ (‘Adonais and Poetic Power’, p. 53). However, in relation to the author, these debilitating defects constitute the fragile exterior to an inner-core of strength, ‘a Power / Girt round with weakness’ (281–2). Heffernan suggests that Shelley ‘wished to project onto Keats the vulnerability he felt in himself, and thus to resolve the profound ambivalence with which he regarded the delicacy of his own idealism’, thereby rendering any exercise in identification a charade in which the subject becomes a site for authorial cleansing (‘Shelley’s Consumption of Keats’, p. 302). Shelley employs a strategy of subjugating the Self to partake of the subject’s weaknesses which, when discarded, validate the author’s superior powers. As O’Neill suggests, ‘the self-portrait is on a knife-edge’ between identification and transcendence, but ultimately it is ‘a version of the poetic self that Shelley will leave behind’ (‘Adonais and Poetic Power’, pp. 52–3). Verse thirty-three of ‘Adonais’ represents the most pronounced example of this feigned empathy: His head was bound with pansies overblown, And faded violets, white, and pied, and blue, And a light spear topped with a cypress cone,



image of the ‘weak hand’, for example, signifies the subject’s physical and poetic deficiency:


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This description of flowers and the forest serves to establish the rank of an author who presides over his metaphoric wealth. Nature’s abundance bedecks Shelley with the ultimate accolade of poethood, the laurel wreath. As a substitute for the dead (in the changed state of Daphne), the author is parading his grief: Keats’s loss crowns the living poet. Furthermore, the author is bestowed with the pine torch, or thyrsus, common to Bacchanalian rites. In this Dionysian guise, Shelley is contesting Adonis’s, and by inference Keats’s, mantle as the god of rebirth. In addition to the Ovidean legend of a hunter killed by his prey, Adonis is also a fertility god, a deity affirming life after death.20 His divinity was manifest in the life that grew out of the earth in summer, was harvested in the autumn, died back in the winter and resurfaced in the spring. Thus, death is not the end of life but a periodic stasis before an anticipated abundance. The figure of Adonis rationalises both the devastation of human loss and the sterility of the land. Embedded within Shelley’s ‘Adonais’, therefore, is a reconciliation to what has passed, or in poetic terms the ‘past’, and the acceptance of a forward-looking focus, a new life to tend and celebrate. The new life is not, however, that of Keats. The subject may be synonymous with the figure of Adonis and his regenerative potential, but Shelley adopts a rival role in Dionysus that also signifies regrowth and authorial potency. Ironically, it is the living poet who benefits from a spring-like resuscitation. The rather detailed phallicism of the ‘rude shaft’ with its rounded end, bushy growth and oozing liquids amply attests to Shelley’s virility. While Keats is a spent force, his growth dashed to a ‘damp death’ or ‘broken lily’, Shelley’s desire is conversely awakened and gradually aroused until he bursts forth with the ‘burning fountain’ of original conception (104, 54, 339). This metaphor for poetic creation and a physical act, i.e. ejaculation, outperforms Keats, displacing the subject’s bodily and literary corpus to establish the author’s own. In the final passage of ‘Adonais’, the author pushes the Self to the outpost of the living and dares the poetic voice to venture beyond death. While Keats’s posthumous voice is ‘An echo and a light unto eternity’, immortal yet composed of repetitive distortions that



Round whose rude shaft dark ivy-tresses grew Yet dripping with the forest’s noonday dew, Vibrated (289–94)

Consuming Keats

dwindle into ‘a dread / Murmur’, the author’s voice resounds like ‘thunder’ (9, 134–5, 274).21 Shelley harnesses the dramatic potential of such atmospheric eruptions which, as Laurence Coupe suggests, herald a ‘violent succession’.22 According to Frazer, the storm, or in this instance Shelley’s vocal bravado, establishes the contender’s right to reign.23 Shelley supplants Keats as the god of fertility and confirms his own poetic supremacy. Initially, Shelley’s oral performance is a source of power that he seems willing to share with the subject: He [Keats] is made one with Nature: there is heard His voice in all her music, from the moan Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird (370–2) Keats’s vocal range is preserved during this latest transformation, and the last line reintroduces his literary corpus through an allusion to ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. However, although Keats’s melodies may be heard, they are orchestrated by Shelley. As Epstein argues, ‘intertextual echoes enter only to be subverted or revised’ (‘Flowers that Mock’, p. 93). In the following stanza, Keats is confined to a ‘dull dense world’ whose inhabitants are incorporated into an unindividuated essence: ‘Torturing th’unwilling dross that checks its flight / To its own likeness, as each mass may bear’ (382, 384–5). Although O’Neill argues for Shelley’s ‘covert respect’ for the ‘unwilling dross’ and the agent who helps shape this substance (p. 50), equally apparent is the subject’s reluctance to ‘bear / His part’ in this pantheistic progression as well as the poet’s association between Keats’s verse and common waste or ‘dross’ (380–1). In effect, Keats loses his sentient awareness, becoming another anonymous sound effect in Nature’s repertoire. In this state, Keats can be abandoned to anonymity: names, attributes, peculiarities are all rendered meaningless for both the reader of this fiction and Keats’s posthumous reputation. Shelley cannot, however, sacrifice his own poetic Self, and re-conceptualises the singular of the Eternal into the plural ‘are’ in the final word of ‘Adonais’ (495). The perpetual transformations that O’Neill sees as driving the poem highlight not only the speaker’s mobility of thought and feeling, but a ‘heroic individualism’ (‘Adonais and Poetic Power’, pp. 51, 56). The author’s vision of immortality is subject to constant remodification throughout the poem, yet Keats is sacrificed to an unyielding entity (similar to the fate of Wordsworth’s



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Lucy in ‘A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal’). Both aspects of Keats’s corpus have been diminished to the point of non-existence: physically, his material presence has been consumed and committed to a pantheistic oblivion; poetically, his voice has been compromised and discredited. Keats is ultimately absent from his own memorial. As Shelley attempts to re-conceive the Self as a Platonic divinity towards the end of the elegy, the partnering proxy, who has previously affirmed the author’s prowess, becomes obsolete. Shelley has transformed his ‘fellow poet’s identity and potent texts into “ghostly insubstantiality”’ (Epstein, p. 97). The ritualistic decompositions and dismemberments that Shelley devised to attain ascendancy are no longer relevant as he aspires to a purely spiritual incarnation: ‘The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me, / Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality’ (485–6). Shelley ‘shatters the acceptance of natural cycles’ (O’Neill, p. 55) as life and rebirth become an ‘eclipsing Curse’ (480). At this point, the author rejects the healing process of grief and consolation, cornerstones upon which the elegy is based: ‘Mourn not for Adonais’ (362). However, a cycle, from Keats’s death to the shedding of Shelley’s physical being and the end of poetic composition, has been enacted. Thus, a future elegist is furnished with the necessary base to begin a subsequent reconfiguration of Keats.

II ‘Adonais’ not only began the ‘slow stain’ of Keats’s poetic afterlife but, as Wolfson states, ‘one of the posthumous fates of “Adonais” itself was its retrospective (or uncannily prophetic) application to Shelley’ (‘Keats Enters History’, p. 36). When editing her late husband’s work, Mary Shelley cast the author of ‘Adonais’ as a tragically sensitive soul and consequently engendered an image of Shelley as ‘the angel imprisoned in human flesh’.24 Fostering this legacy, Matthew Arnold’s vision of the poet as a ‘beautiful ineffectual angel beating his luminous wings in vain’ is also reminiscent of descriptions of Keats in ‘Adonais’: ‘Lost angel of a ruined Paradise’ with ‘aërial eyes that kindle day’ (88, 123).25 After death, Shelley becomes subject to the emasculating transformations that he designed for Keats. The process of mythologising the poet turns in on its author, disregarding the former divide between Self and Other. Milnes, for instance, concluded his landmark biography of Keats with a reference to ‘Adonais’ and an image of the two poets residing together in heaven as ‘twin stars’.26




Consuming Keats

Encompassing both Keats and Shelley, the ‘ “Ariel” syndrome’ becomes an integral part of the nineteenth-century poetic identity (Footsteps, p. 151). Writing his tribute to Keats in the mid-1850s, Robert Browning inherits a legacy in which a previous elegist and his conception of the subject are now synonymous.27 Shelley’s ascendancy over Keats in ‘Adonais’ has been explored in Part I, but influence is not fixed in one moment of literary interaction. The subject does not remain the sole property of a single elegist; Shelley is no longer able to control the posthumous path of Keats’s, or even his own, reputation. As a result, Shelley’s uncontested reign over the Keatsian archetype can be challenged and usurped. Like Keats, he too can be rendered malleable by the threat of decomposition and dis/re/memberment. Therefore, Browning does not enter this triumvirate as an equal partner; he supersedes Shelley as the poetic Self, relegating the dead poet to a status, or lack of status, comparable with that of the subject. This is, however, a complex scenario as Browning is forced to encounter Shelley and his formative contribution to Keats-based elegies; ‘Adonais’ is a potent source of influence that must be negotiated before it can be diffused by the new pretender to elegiac supremacy. ‘Adonais’ constitutes Browning’s elegiac inheritance and he was familiar with the work of both Romantic poets. Both Keats and Shelley were early discoveries for Browning; the poet’s mother bought him first editions of Shelley’s work and he obtained copies of Endymion and ‘Lamia’ while still a teenager. This leads George H. Ford to the conclusion that ‘Browning was the first of the major Victorian poets to discover Keats’.28 Shelley’s poetry arguably had a more immediate impact on Browning, yet ‘his liking for Keats was more lasting. Shelley paled for him in later years, but Keats he praised to the end’ (Keats and the Victorians, p. 10). In ‘One Word More’, Keats is ranked alongside Homer, a position that did not dwindle as Browning got older; towards the end of his life, Milton and Keats share the prestigious accolade of ‘the superhuman poet-pair’ (‘With Christopher Smart’, 103). Browning valued a cast of Keats’s head given to him by Rossetti and gave public readings on the poet’s work.29 While all this attests to Browning’s admiration of Keats, it confirms no actual poetic influence. Ford states that ‘although one can find occasional Keats-like buttons in several of the poems, they are certainly not his daily wear’ (p. 11).30 Browning begins ‘Popularity’, his tribute to Keats, by attempting to locate the unnamed subject: ‘Stand still, true poet that you are! / I know you; let me try and draw



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you’ (Appendix 2, 1–2). The author repeatedly proposes to sketch a portrait of Keats without providing any descriptive details. Consequently, the subject is not realised and remains no more than a depersonalised concept until the final line of the poem: ‘What porridge had John Keats?’ (65). Throughout ‘Popularity’, Browning laments the obscurity of an immortal talent, ‘few or none to watch and wonder’ (22), yet the poem could be commemorating any one of the ‘inheritors of unfulfilled renown’ referred to in ‘Adonais’ (397). At the beginning of ‘Popularity’, Keats resides in the heavens, yet his ‘star quality’ is stifled through an enforced incarceration: ‘His [God’s] clenched hand shall unclose at last, / I know, and let out all the beauty’ (11–12). Keats is but a ‘glow-worm’ to the Almighty, a creature of the lower echelons of the creative order (reminiscent of the parasites that feed on the subject’s corpse in ‘Adonais’, 6). The use of God as an authorial proxy enables Browning to present Keats as an inferior, dehumanised life form whilst maintaining a façade of poetic praise for the forefather. Moreover, a servile image of the subject cannot compete with a commanding authorial tone. In response to the proximity of his precursors, the Self is installed from the outset of the poem while the act of commemoration is relegated to the closing stanza. The emergence of a superior Self is an intrinsic part of ‘Adonais’, but here Browning situates the Self at the beginning of ‘Popularity’ and the elegiac subject at the end. In effect, the current author’s bid for poetic supremacy actually circumvents the elegiac rite-of-passage. In the first line of his poem, Shelley begins by emphasising the finality of Keats’s tragic end, ‘I weep for Adonais – he is dead!’, and proceeds to detail the decomposition and dismemberments that enable an authorial recomposition. By contrast, Browning disassociates himself from the subject being commemorated and cannot therefore capitalise on the regenerative potential of his tribute.31 In ‘Adonais’, Shelley imbibes the regrowth of decay whereas ‘Popularity’ questions the process of life, death and rebirth. From the beginning of his poem, Browning evaluates this cycle to determine if it is rooted in progress or indicative of creative decline. Keats’s precious poetic gift, represented as the famed dye of Tyre, is envisaged as a metaphoric birth, an effusion from the waters that engulfed Shelley at the end of ‘Adonais’. The shell emerges from the violent, contraction-like ‘thresh’ of the rockweeds and the amniotic ‘foam’ of the sea (40). Before the beauteous dye is extracted, it is a ‘rough mesh’, yet Browning also emphasises the ‘fresh’ appearance of this raw state; the ‘lisp’ of lapping waves can




Consuming Keats

still be heard from the shell, the sound of water being synonymous with the moment of parturition: ‘Yet there’s the dye / [. . .] The sea has only just o’erwhispered’ (36–7). However, the surrounding stanzas detract from the purity of these images. Man’s intervention in this natural scene is evident from the outset; the shells are trapped in nets and ‘brought to land’ (25). The ‘catch’ is initially the subject of criticism by detractors who ‘quote tradition’ – referring to the negative reviews Keats received – yet the rarity of the dye ‘pricked a king’s ambition’ (32–4). Thus, the focus of Browning’s poem shifts from recognition, or the bane of obscurity, to misappropriation. The Biblical and Ancient Kingdom ruler Solomon adorns his seat of power with the Tyrian dye. That, when gold-robed he took the throne In that abyss of blue, the Spouse Might swear his presence shone. (43–5) The figurative wealth of the ocean now reflects a narcissistic materialism. The birthing metaphor is extended to encompass this mercenary use of the dye in the quotation below, yet the idyllic impression of the previous scene is now lost. Most like the centre-spike of gold Which burns deep in the blue-bell’s womb. (46–7) The ‘womb’ is defiled by the flower’s own masculine member. The colour of this penetrating weapon recalls the ‘gold-robed’ regalia of Solomon from the previous stanza, which suggests that his avarice for rich ornamentation and artifice has polluted the essence of beauty. Nature and, by inference, Keats’s artistry have been ‘deflowered’ and despoiled. Browning presents a disturbing image of purity perverted by greed, the ultimate negation of a poetic rebirth, but ‘Popularity’ offers the reader no alternative path. The narrative, charting the legendary dye from its original habitat to contemporary usage, establishes the mythologising process as an unavoidable course of events (the stamen of a flower is, of course, part of Nature and necessary for reproduction). Browning castigates the process of commodification, ‘there’s the extract, flasked and fine, / And priced and saleable at last!’, while its proponents are imagined as gorging parasites: yet the final image of the poem equates Keats’s, and the author’s own, need



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for public acclaim with an appetite for food (56–7). In this poem, even God views his subject as a comestible, a ‘good wine’, thereby connecting Him with the claret-drinking Nobbs (20). God, or ‘the earth’s feast master’, resembles the vegetative deities – specifically Dionysus and his cultivation of the vine – which signified, for Shelley, the interconnected cycles of nature and elegy (16). Browning’s references to the Lord of all creation and creativity therefore reinstate a belief in regeneration through consumption. This gestatory discourse leads into the story of ‘a fisher on the sand / By Tyre the old’ (23–4). The penultimate line of the poem, ‘Who fished the murex up?’, emphasises the significance of the fisherman and relates its symbolic relevance to the author; once again, Browning asks the reader to recognise his primary role in the resurrection of the forefather (64). The poet therefore becomes a Christ-like Saviour, the fisher of men, whose poem retrieves Keats’s corpus. In so doing, however, the author must adopt the language of consumerism: the prized shells that signify Keats’s verse are the ‘ocean-plunder’ that fishermen strip from its natural habitat to colour the ‘Raw silk the merchant sells’ (24, 30). Paradoxically, Browning acknowledges his active part in the cultural construction of Keats, the cycle of renewed life, through a cynical discourse of marketability. The author’s tone may be disparaging, critical of commodification and consumption, but he cannot separate himself from a process that his own creative act promotes. Indeed, in presenting Keats as a mollusc, a comestible inferior in size and stature to the poet, Browning’s subject is not only fixed in the food chain but located at its base. Thus far, Keats has been prey to the primary predator of ‘Adonais’ and is subsequently fed on by hordes of secondary and tertiary consumers.

III Around the time that ‘Popularity’ was written, Elizabeth Barrett Browning included a tribute to Keats in Aurora Leigh (1856). By Keats’s soul, the man who never stepped In gradual progress like another man, But, turning grandly on his central self, Ensphered himself in twenty perfect years And died.




Consuming Keats

In accordance with the Victorian archetype, Keats’s poetic life is signified here by self-consumption and death. The monosyllabic ‘And died’ borders on bathos. Barrett Browning was not, however, the only female writer to be attracted to this subject: amongst others, Christina Rossetti wrote her sonnet ‘On Keats’ in 1849 (Appendix 3) and Alice Meynell composed a poem on the same topic in 1869 (Appendix 4). Meynell and Rossetti represent an oasis of experimental writing, a divergence from the nineteenth-century tradition as established by Shelley and Browning. This section will attempt to determine how certain women writers regard Keats as an elegiac subject, and the effect of their respective approaches on the Self/Other relation. Most significantly, I will be attempting to ascertain whether a gendered approach to Keats is discernible. In contrast to the marginalisation or attempted eradication of the subject in ‘Adonais’ and ‘Popularity’, the female elegist typically strives to recuperate the object of loss. As Celeste M. Schenck states, ‘Built upon a different set of internalized relations with predecessors, the female elegy is a poem of connectedness.’32 Christina Rossetti, for example, forms an immediate bond between her poem and Keats through form: ‘On Keats’ is an Italian sonnet, favoured by the Romantic poet in his most promising early work, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ and ‘On Seeing the Elgin Marbles’. As Rossetti was just nineteen when she wrote her elegy, two years younger than Keats when he wrote ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, form is used as a means of relating her poetic development to the subject’s. Keats is employed as a role model and more directly invoked by references to his work: ‘While the chilly shadows flit / Of sweet St Agnes’ Eve, while basil springs / His name, in every humble heart that sings.’33 Sound is significant, as in Shelley’s ‘Adonais’, but here Keats’s voice remains distinct. Moreover, the subject is a source of celebration. Scholars of Rossetti’s work have traditionally dismissed the notion of Keatsian influence in her poetry. Frances Thomas’s biography of Rossetti addresses the issue of Keats with the following lines: ‘In 1865, Christina wrote to Gabriel, replying to a comment that some lines in her poem A Royal Princess were too reminiscent of Keats: “Is it so very like Keats? I doubt if I ever read the lines in question, having never read the Isabella through.” ’34 Yet, as quoted above,



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Christina pays tribute to Isabella’s basil plant in her sonnet ‘On Keats’, which was written sixteen years before this incident. What Thomas fails to consider is the possibility that Rossetti’s professed ignorance is a response to the charge of plagiarism, and one that retracts a challenge to her brother’s ascendancy in all matters regarding Keats. Christina’s denial leaves Dante Gabriel’s prior claim to Keats uncontested. It is significant to note that Ford alludes to Christina only once in his study of Keatsian influence, yet devotes an entire chapter to her brother. A few critics, namely Lona Mosk Packer and Barbara Fass, oppose this position, with the former claiming that it was Christina ‘and not Gabriel or Holman Hunt [who] was the first “Pre-Raphaelite” to appreciate Keats. The poem that caught her fancy, though in an abridged and mutilated form, was The Eve of St Agnes.’35 Rossetti’s knowledge of this poem is confirmed by her sonnet ‘On Keats’, which in itself attests to the significance of the poet in her early writing career. In ‘Christina Rossetti and St Agnes’ Eve’, Fass highlights the importance of the female poet’s familiarity with a work that ‘juxtapos[ed] the religious with the erotic’.36 When commenting on Rossetti’s poem ‘An Old World Thicket’, Antony Harrison also connects these two seemingly incongruous themes: Rossetti’s poem begins in a secular, Keatsian vein, echoing the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. [. . .] It adopts and adapts lush Keatsian and early Tennysonian hedonistic image patterns. [. . .] But Rossetti concludes her poem by rejecting the vocabularies and the secular epiphanies of Keats and early Tennyson [. . .] in favor of a quietly symbolic, traditionally Christian apocalypse.37 Surely, however, it is an over-simplification to suggest that Keats merely facilitated the purging of Romantic influences. Sexual passion, temptation and transgression remained central tenets of Rossetti’s poetry to the end of her writing life. As David Latham argues, an affinity with Keatsian aesthetics admits ‘shifts between the spiritual and the sexual’.38 Moreover, this ostensibly incompatible pairing is not only evident in the direct reference to ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ in ‘On Keats’. Rossetti also notes the date on which she composed the sonnet: ‘18 January 1849’, followed by ‘Eve of St Agnes’ in parenthesis. With this epilogue,




Consuming Keats

Rossetti adopts a position comparable to that of Keats’s character, Madeline, when she awaits ‘visions of delight / And soft adorings from their loves receive / Upon the honeyed middle of the night’ (47–9). Not only does this identify a discourse of desire in Rossetti’s poem, but also associates the subject of ‘On Keats’ with the role of lover. A noticeable aspect of women’s elegies on Keats is a devotion to the subject: to give one example, Louise Morgan Sill professes ‘I do love thee’ in her intimate tribute ‘To Keats’ (2). With the description of Keats as ‘the strong man’, Rossetti’s appreciation of her muse becomes physical as well as literary (3). Her portrait of masculinity counters the images of Keats’s fragility and impotence in ‘Adonais’ and other elegists who present the poet as a ‘bruised reed’ (‘Keats’, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 14). From the emasculation of the subject within the patriarchal tradition, Keats becomes a prospective partner. In addition to evoking Keats’s literary corpus, Rossetti generates a bodily intimacy with the dead poet. Rossetti displays her poetic indebtedness to Keats – his work inspires her creative act – while also regarding the poet as an object of desire. Furthermore, the recurrent issue of ‘connectedness’, or ‘connective tissue, fleshly bonds’, raises the theme of decomposition (Schenck, p. 24). In contrast to Shelley’s disturbingly penetrative images, Keats’s interment in the grave is seen as a blessing: ‘Unto him a goodly lot / Hath fallen in fertile ground’ (4–5). The use of words such as ‘goodly’ and ‘fertile’ to describe this process suggest both a sensual and a holy union, thus encapsulating the dualistic, and seemingly irreconcilable, nature of Keats’s influence on Rossetti. Significantly, the elegiac subject embodies the productive cycle of nature, ‘His earth is but sweet leaves which fall and rot’, thereby reclaiming the role of regenerative god that was usurped by Shelley (8). Keats is positioned within the protective earth, a cultivated and picturesque garden, that has traditionally been envisaged as a female body. Therefore, the fertile ground can be read as a figurative representation of the author, through which Rossetti’s desires may be fulfilled. Alice Meynell’s elegy to Keats also equates the relationship between poet and poetess with the physical bond between man and woman.39 Meynell wrote ‘On Keats’s Grave’ in her early twenties, prior to the public recognition of her poetry and journalism, yet Robinson claims that it ‘is one of the most serious of nineteenth-century poems



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about Keats’ (p. 69). It is certainly complex in terms of both form and content: ‘On Keats’s Grave’ is a lengthy poem which is unconfined by the structure of Rossetti’s sonnet. Meynell abandons stylistic indebtedness and dispenses with a consistent rhyme scheme, governing meter and regular stanza length. Instead, the ‘fluid boundaries’ between lines ‘imitates linguistically the intertwining of the lives it thematizes’ (Schenck, pp. 16, 23). Robinson outlines the ambitious aim of this elegy: ‘Meynell tries to establish the relationship between the death of the poet, the life or sources of poetry, and the making of new poems’ (p. 72). She is, therefore, acknowledging the corpse, the literary corpus, and the goal of creating a corpus for the living author. These three stages begin with the subject and end with an emergent Self, akin to the Shelleyan schema, but here the author’s progression is dependent on Keats’s bodily and literary presence. ‘On Keats’s Grave’ relies on elegiac strategies of self-advancement while also working from a perspective of mutual exchange with the subject. Meynell begins her poem with a brief epigraph: ‘he said that the greatest delight of his life had been to watch the growth of flowers. And when dying “I feel them growing over me” ’. In prefacing her elegy with this poignant reference to Keats, Meynell generates a mood of sensitivity and immediately reclaims the voice of the subject. In the aptly named ‘On Keats’s Grave’, the issue of death is explored through Keats’s relationship with flowers: And daisies infantine were thoughts of his, And different grasses solved his mysteries. He lived in flowers a snatch of spring, And had a dying longing that uncloses In wild white roses. (7–11)40 The ‘dying longing’ recalls the spectre of death yet the rose ‘uncloses’, like the opening of the shell in ‘Popularity’, to reveal a rare beauty hidden within. Both Browning and Meynell imagine the birth of Keatsian verse, counteracting the morbid tendency to focus on a life foreshadowed by death. Crucially, however, Meynell’s blossoming Keats reverses the demonstrative deflowering of the elegiac subject in ‘Popularity’. Keats’s final resting place conveys a sense of beginning through the flowers that flourish




Consuming Keats

from his apparently lifeless form: ‘a summer of enchanted flowers / Do mark his place, his dying. / Sweet life’ (37–9). The end of this quotation encapsulates the almost oxymoronic nature of rebirth with new life issuing from the ‘ended’ poet. Keats is nurtured rather than attacked in the grave and grows in the womb-like earth, a repository of female significance and power. Another significant point of departure from previous elegists is Meynell’s regard for the subject and sound. Shelley envisages ‘The silence of that heart’s [Keats’s] accepted sacrifice’ (‘Adonais’, 315) and, similarly, Meynell presents her own ‘silent living poet’s heart / Where no song is’ (49–50). Yet even though a parallel is formed with ‘Adonais’, Meynell does not seek to amplify the voice of the Self; rather, she marks Keats’s muteness with an appropriate form of mourning: ‘And that was, too, a silent time for me’ (23). Meynell’s poem develops in accordance with Keats’s progression from silence to sound, inertia to activity. Her self-renewal germinates out of the dead body’s growth: ‘And thro’ the sleeping season break / With young new shoots for this young poet’s sake’ (69–70). Reminiscent of Rossetti’s focus on Keats’s body, this awakening is both literary and physical. The author confesses to having ‘felt wild things’ about Keats; she recalls ‘the thoughts I love’, evoked by a possible union with the subject, which will ‘Stir thou in me and move’ (19, 73, 74). Poetic conception is described in terms of a sexual insemination, the birth of an idea comparable with a living embryo. Meynell and Rossetti are the first poets discussed in this chapter to exhume Keats, reanimate the past and embody its potency within the Self. An appreciation of his reproductive potential nurtures theirs. Thus, when Meynell precipitates the resurrection of the subject, and Keats arises from ‘underground’ in the form of the ‘Sweet flower grown over him’, she signals her own progress as a poet (76–7). The success of the Self, therefore, is still related to the representation of Keats and the dynamics of death, decomposition and recomposition, but for Meynell and Rossetti this does not necessitate suppression. These female elegists do not work against but with Keats, and subsequently reap the rewards for both the Self and the subject. Significantly, Meynell’s and Rossetti’s ‘experimental’ elegies prefigure the twentieth-century trend towards a ‘poetry of aperture’ and creative possibilities (Robinson, p. 16).



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Although I have ascertained that elegies to Keats did not consist entirely of the self-serving, enclosed poetics of Shelley and Browning, Rossetti and Meynell represent a minority that ‘clearly enjoyed an elegiac mode of their own’ (Schenck, p. 23). To prevent a distortion of the overall picture, it is necessary to reiterate a pertinent point: the majority of nineteenth-century poetic tributes to Keats re-enact the tragic scenario of death and injustice inherited from ‘Adonais’. To give a few examples: John Clare writes of ‘Rancour’s aims’ in his sonnet ‘To the Memory of John Keats’ (5), S. Laman Blanchard depicts the ‘torturings’ endured by Keats and his resulting ‘martyred fame’ (‘In Memory of Keats’, 12–13), while Perry Marshall’s poem is aptly entitled ‘Keats’ Critics’. This standard representation of the subject became so conspicuous that Swinburne based his poem, ‘In Sepulcretis’, on this aspect of Keats’s afterlife (Appendix 5, referred to as ‘Post Mortem’ in Robinson’s study). Typically, Keats is portrayed as weak and defenceless with his vulnerable ‘stark-naked soul’ (24). The ‘ravenous grave-worms’ also make an appearance, yet here the gnawing invertebrates inflict ‘Small hurt’ in comparison with the more invidious enemy that menaced the subject’s corpse in ‘Adonais’ (46, 4). Swinburne’s scorn is reserved for the ‘loathsome Love’ of authors and artists whose ‘tongues defile the dead man’s name’ (10–11). Unlike the consensual unions depicted by Meynell and Rossetti, the discourse of rape is employed throughout this poem to expose the violating ‘probe that stings like shame’ (11). Every interpreter of Keats is rendered a voyeuristic ‘Spy’ (25). One such pretender who ‘comes to crown with praise the dust of death’ merits consideration (40). Unlike previous elegies of Keats that obscure or peripheralise the subject, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sonnet attempts to re-personalise the genre (Appendix 6).41 The opening line of ‘John Keats’ locates the poet in London, introducing the significance of place to an author. However, the subject is immediately dislocated by the break at the end of the second line, followed by ‘strange road’ (2). This image of London is actually a non-specific, romanticised portrait of degradation: The weltering London ways where children weep And girls whom none call maidens laugh, – strange road. (1–2)



IV

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Consuming Keats

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlot’s curse Blasts the new-born Infant’s tear, And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse. (13–16) In stark contrast, Rossetti then invites the reader to envisage the mythological conceptions of Keats’s imagination: ‘he inly trode / The bright Castalian brink and Latmos’ steep’ (3–4). Creativity is presented as an oasis of uncontaminated culture, distinct from the outer world. Rossetti acknowledges that such a binary opposition between context and content must be arbitrary in the phrase ‘his life’s cross-paths’, but the plural denoting possession only serves to emphasise the awkward reiteration of the hissing sibilant ‘s’ (5).42 Such insonorance slows the pace of the poem to suggest that the moment of convergence between the mythic and the ‘real’ landscapes that Keats inhabits remains an obstacle. This struggle retards the subject’s progress in the following image: ‘till deathly deep / He toiled through sands of Lethe’ (5–6). Allusions to the Underworld’s river of forgetfulness most notably appear in Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Ode on Melancholy’. Lethe signifies a metaphoric state of oblivion to which the persona has ‘sunk’ at the beginning of both poems; he must reassert his creativity through the poetic act to arise out of human lethargy and obtain immortality (‘Ode to a Nightingale’, 4). Keats’s fear of drowning in an indulged semi-consciousness, expressed in the desperate opening of ‘Ode on Melancholy’ – ‘No, no, go not to Lethe’ – is realised in Rossetti’s poem when the subject is immersed ‘deathly deep’ in sand.43 In contrast to Meynell’s and his sister’s resuscitation of the subject, the description of society ‘Miring his outward steps’ weighs down Keats’s body. Rossetti concludes the octave by envisaging ‘Rome’s sheltering shadow wrapped his sleep’, an image of protection that also suggests smothering (the alliteration in this line echoes the discordance earlier in the poem 8). Furthermore, Rossetti not only enacts a ritual murder through the subject’s own poetic anxieties, regarding the river Lethe, he also undermines Keats’s actual words:



These are Blakean images of innocence cruelly perverted and mocked by experience, echoing lines in ‘London’:


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Keats imagined his own epitaph – to which the ‘writ’ refers – residing in the transitory medium of water, which thereby acknowledges the instability of both the poetic life and afterlife. However, unlike Christina Rossetti, who quotes Keats’s ‘Here lies one whose name was writ / in water’ in full, Dante Gabriel erodes the poet’s ‘record of himself’ with the ephemerality of verbal ‘rumour’ (‘On Keats’, 10–11, 9).44 Rather than being part of what Keats saw as the unfixed tides of time, his epitaph is engulfed by ‘Time’s flood’ and can be replaced with an identity conceived by the current writing Self. Keats’s name will be immortalised, not through his own words as in Christina Rossetti’s poem, but through the re-inscriptions of successive elegists. To Rossetti, it is this poetic process that will persist, as the final word of the sonnet suggests, for ‘evermore’. Although, in some respects, Rossetti’s elegy can be seen as a departure from its antecedents by accrediting the posthumous significance of the subject, Keats is silenced once more whilst the author charts his dependable course to an improved Self.

V The same year as Rossetti’s ‘John Keats’ appeared, Oscar Wilde’s sonnets, ‘The Grave of Keats’ (Appendix 7) and ‘On the Sale by Auction of Keats’s Love Letters’ were published in Poems of 1881.45 Unlike Rossetti, however, Wilde’s conception of Keats is not defined by self-interest. The poems I shall be addressing in this section do not represent ostensible tributes that conceal the threat of subjugation.46 The subject does not merely figure as a conduit through which the male author realises his literary aspirations. Once again, Keats’s position can be judged through the employment of his own epitaph: ‘Thy name was writ in water – it shall stand’ (‘The Grave of Keats’, 12). The difference between Wilde and Rossetti is denoted by the dash and following half-line, which signals a moment of departure from past elegists working within the patriarchal tradition. Rather than revising or erasing Keats’s epitaph, Wilde proudly proclaims his dying words and proceeds to recognise the subject’s poetic corpus.47



thy name, not writ But rumour’d in water, while the fame of it Along Time’s flood goes echoing evermore. (12–14)

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Consuming Keats

This reference to ‘Isabella’ reveals an interdependency between the author and his subject. As Isabella’s grief feeds the earth that encases her lover’s decapitated head, so Wilde’s tears enrich Keats’s posthumous reputation. Furthermore, as Isabella and Lorenzo’s tale is retold and their ‘sad ditty’ becomes part of local folklore, so allusions to Keats’s poems lengthen his after life (‘Isabella’, 501). This act of commemoration is therefore a mutually beneficial endeavour. Wilde acknowledges the gulf that separates him from the dead, ‘Taken from life when life and love were new’, thereby asserting the primacy of his own existence (‘The Grave of Keats’, 3). However, Keats’s death does not lessen his role in the elegiac cycle: ‘gentle violets weeping with the dew / Weave on his bones an ever-blossoming chain’ (7–8). As in Meynell’s poem, Keats’s corpse provides a fertile core for nature’s feeding flowers. Yet a parasitical relationship is also evident in the morbidly physical image, ‘Weave on his bones’. In this context, the reference to ‘Isabella’ reminds the reader of the grotesque growth, the ‘vile’ mouldering head that survives death; pretty flowers ornament the grave, masking the grim reality beneath the surface (‘Isabella’, 475). Compensation can, however, be found in Wilde’s description of the poet’s afterlife as an ‘ever-blossoming chain’, a reference to the series of progenitative tributes that now includes ‘The Grave of Keats’. Reconfirming rebirth, the living author rejects a Shelleyan rivalry with the subject and fellow elegists. In both Alice Meynell’s and Christina Rossetti’s elegies, the grave and its profusion of blooms are a focal point for poetic inspiration and, more significantly, sexual desire. Such sensuous imagery is also evident in Wilde’s and, remarkably, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s respective poems. Both ‘The Grave of Keats’ and ‘John Keats’ dwell upon the floral recolonisation of dead poet: in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem, the daisies grow so densely that ‘Their fragrance clings around thy [Keats’s] name’, while the depiction of ‘reverberant lips’ is decidedly erotic (‘John Keats’, 9, 12). Wilde similarly directs the reader to his subject’s ‘sweetest lips’ (10), recalling Christina Rossetti’s use of the adjective ‘sweet’ to describe the sacred earth that embraces Keats’s form (8). In an earlier version of ‘The Grave of Keats’, Wilde combines the sensuality of Keats’s mouth with the blooms issuing from his corpse in a single image: ‘red-lipped daisies’.48 Such



And tears like mine will keep thy memory green, As Isabella did her Basil-tree. (13–14)

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florid metaphors are subsequently applied to Wilde’s lover, Bosie: ‘My Own Boy . . . it is a marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours should have been made no less for music of song than for madness of kissing’, thereby introducing a discourse of same-sex desire into his descriptions of Keats.49 From this perspective, the coloured buds of Keats’s mouth, also prominent in Wilde’s portrait of the poet in ‘The Tomb of Keats’, represent a metonymic focus for the homoerotic gaze. Although this objectifies the Other, and represents a disembodied image that could potentially depersonalise and even dehumanise the elegiac subject, it also recomposes Keats physically. In contrast, for example, with Shelley’s devouring pantheism, the subject becomes reclaimable through the body. Any competitive instincts are effectively inverted by courtship rituals that are reminiscent of female elegists. There is the strong suggestion of necrophilia, an abnormal relationship between the decaying corpse and the desiring gaze, yet a repeated emphasis on the colour red to describe Keats’s lips signifies blood and therefore life. Once more, Wilde is inverting a Shelleyan trait; rather than diminishing Keats, the present elegist reinfuses the subject through the site of resuscitation – the mouth. As Robinson suggests, To invoke Keats’s lips turns the poem itself into a kiss; the distance of the years, the barrier between life and death and between poetry written aye long ago and that being written now collapses into this most intimate and sensuous of connections. (p. 74) The issue of literary and bodily ‘connectedness’, raised in relation to female elegists, now becomes applicable to Wilde. A year after the publication of Poems, Wilde declared to Emma Speed that Keats is ‘the man I love’ (21 March 1882).50 In the same letter, Wilde confesses that ‘since my boyhood I have loved none better than your marvellous kinsman, that godlike boy’. Use of the present tense here raises the suggestion of a physical and emotional interaction with the precursor. Interaction implies reciprocation and, as James Najarian argues, Wilde ‘metaphorically associated Keats [. . .] with the man attracted to his own sex’ (Victorian Keats, p. 19). In order for Wilde to define his sexual and literary identity, Keats becomes a ‘closeted gay male’ while his poetry is employed to ‘create a homoerotic ethic’.51 Throughout Poems, representations of Keats and allusions to his work are charged with homoerotic imagery. The subject’s sexual




Consuming Keats

orientation is, to a large extent, irrelevant; what remains significant is the ‘literary genesis for same-sex affection in Keats’s aesthetics’ (Victorian Keats, p. 158). Reprising the role of the Greek hero, Wilde’s ‘Endymion’ is not a straightforward elegy to the man Keats, but a tribute to his work (established in the direct referencing of its title). In contrast to Shelley’s role as the shepherd in ‘Adonais’, Wilde’s Endymion remains the focus of the poem and is depicted in characteristically homoerotic terms: And he is soft as any dove, And brown and curly is his hair. (13–14) Recalling ‘The Tomb of Keats’, this portrait is strikingly similar to that of Keats as Sebastian – ‘a lovely brown boy, with crisp, clustering hair’ – and a line of verse quoted to Emma Speed, ‘his hymeneal curls’ (‘Tomb of Keats’, p. 5).52 The ‘lad’s brown hair’ acts as a metonymic sign for physical desire until the final verse when the trademark image of ‘lips vermilion’ appears (25, 37). In Wilde’s ‘Endymion’, the poet portrays a sexual bond between the hero and the ‘Lady moon’ (7). Therefore, in both Keats’s and his imitator’s version, there is a male and female pairing. However, the third part of Wilde’s triangle is not revealed to be a goddess synonymous with the first as in Keats’s poem. Significantly, the speaker in Wilde’s poem performs the role of an abandoned lover when Endymion elopes with the goddess. Through the guise of a poetic persona, Wilde attempts to partner Endymion, and by association Keats, as his ‘own true lover’ (36).53 Najarian’s comments on Severn’s description of Endymion are equally revealing here: ‘Desire for the body of the poet is triangulated through the apparition of a beautiful young man’ (Victorian Keats, pp. 47–8). Wilde laments the loss of his lover’s phallic member – ‘The shepherd’s crook, the purple shoon?’ (38) – and envies the touch of the moon-goddess in a final expression of homoeroticism: Ah! thou hast young Endymion, Thou hast the lips that should be kissed! (41–2) The exclamation marks in these lines reveal frustration, a desperate desire to initiate physical contact with the hero: yet this suggests a



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more dominant role for Wilde than is evident in the poem. In ‘Adonais’, Shelley identifies himself with Narcissus while the subject functions as an effeminised complement. By contrast, Wilde, equates his poetic voice with the stranded subordination Echo; he represents the stationary position from which the action proceeds. Wilde is the inactive observer, or what Alan Sinfield describes as the ‘passive receptor’ (Wilde Century, p. 32). The counterpart of the warrior, this Ganymede-like figure is the ‘younger [. . .] partner who serves another man’s pleasure’. Sinfield states that prior to the Wilde trials of 1895, only the Ganymede or receptor of a sexual relationship aroused public concern; this figure ‘perverted’ nature by becoming womanish. In ‘Endymion’, Wilde not only envisages himself as an effeminate victim, but also exemplifies the most publicly stigmatised and ‘deviant’ characteristics of the homosexual male during this period. Whilst not immediately apparent, Wilde’s subversive desires can be traced back to Keats’s Endymion. To varying degrees, both versions of the Greek myth transgress prescribed gender boundaries or, as Najarian states, ‘describe dissident sexualities’ (Victorian Keats, p. 34). When Keats’s Endymion descends into the Underworld and encounters the dormant Adonis, the latter is described as follows: there lay a sleeping youth Of fondest beauty [. . .] Sideway his face reposed On one white arm, and tenderly unclosed, By tenderest pressure, a faint damask mouth To slumbery pout. (Endymion, II, 393–4, 403–6) Christopher Ricks focuses on these lines and discusses the embarrassment they induce. The ‘autumn blush’ arises from Adonis’s sensual appearance as he sleeps and the awkward position of both Endymion and the reader when observing someone in a state of ‘frankest physicality’ (what Ricks also refers to as ‘defencelessness’, forming a parallel between Keats’s and Shelley’s presentation of Adonis).54 Both Keats’s and his hero’s embarrassment derives from the recognition that ‘the male body could be an object of attraction’ (Victorian Keats, p. 113). As Najarian suggests, ‘In Endymion, Keats




Consuming Keats

expands the notion of what sensuous love is’; whether for someone of the opposite or same sex, desire is simply desire (‘Greater Love’, p. 27). The homoeroticism in this poem becomes so explicit that the author interjects with the story of Adonis’s castrative end, when the ‘boar buried its tusk deep within his groin’, to dampen his hero’s ardour (Graves, p. 120). It is significant to note, however, that Adonis is encountered underground, which emphasises the clandestine subtextuality of the meeting and reminds the reader that Endymion is in the symbolic realm of death, a transitional phase before rebirth. Therefore, in Keats’s Endymion, effeminacy and same-sex desire are roles to be shed in the quest for true love and immortality. For the most part of this epic journey, Keats emphasises Endymion’s masculinity in an attempt to formulate his own indomitable voice. Endymion’s adventurous spirit is certainly heroic as are his pursuits; for example, in Book III when he rescues the damned Glaucus and hordes of drowned lovers. However, Keats’s depictions of masculinity are invariably ambivalent, resulting in an ‘erotic indeterminacy’ that is nowhere more evident than in Semele’s seduction of Endymion (Victorian Keats, p. 36). The hero begins by describing his pastime as a hunter: I, who, for very sport of heart, would race With my own steed from Araby; pluck down A vulture from his towery perching; frown A lion into growling. (I, 533–6) Yet such bravado is diminished by his unrequited love and the locale of his confession. The speaker is situated in a typically feminised landscape, ‘Under her [his sister’s] favourite bower’s quiet shade’, after Peona, who acts as protector of Endymion’s troubled mind, has guided him to the spot (I, 437). When Endymion concludes his tale of intoxicated longing, Peona ridicules her brother and condemns his self-pitying inactivity: ‘Shame / On this poor weakness’ (737–8). A similar sentiment is voiced when the poetic persona interjects with ‘O ‘tis a very sin / For one so weak to venture his poor verse / In such a place as this’ (III, 937–9). These insecurities intensify as the poem progresses; echoing Endymion’s lamentations for the loss of his goddess, Keats fears abandonment by his Muse. Wilde’s persona in ‘Endymion’ is also abandoned by his partner and succumbs to a grief-stricken self-indulgence (‘self-indulgent’



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being one of Ganymede’s traits, OED). As Keats’s Endymion is separated from his beloved for a substantial part of the narrative, so the intimacy Wilde desires is denied by a ‘veil of drifting mist’ that divides the speaker from his object (40). This image not only relates to the estrangement of these two men, but also reflects the distance between Wilde as a living poet, trying to determine a role, and the more established literary past.55 The ‘grey and misty veil’ of Wilde’s ‘Endymion’ reappears in ‘The Garden of Eros’ and once again prevents the hoped-for union (93). Wilde longs to ‘embrace’ Keats, but ‘those pale flying feet [. . .] fade away’ (‘Eros’, 96). The remainder of the poem is spent in a ‘fruitless chase’ to capture Keats: the reiterated line ‘Spirit of Beauty! tarry still awhile’, and its subsequent derivations, ‘tarry with us still’, ‘tarry yet awhile!’, structure passages of the poem and generate momentum, while the subject becomes increasingly elusive (95, 103, 156, 193). The author presents himself as an ideal progeny, the ‘most ardent worshipper’, but the forefather remains frustratingly out of reach (149). In Wilde’s version of ‘Endymion’, the author’s trepidation is evident in an allusion to ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’: The falling dew is cold and chill, And no birds sing in Arcady, The little fauns have left the hill. (29–31) Wilde’s persona, like Keats’s knight, is ‘woe-begone’ and trapped in a sterile landscape (‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, 6). In both ‘Endymion’ and ‘La Belle Dame’, the protagonist relates his story from the perspective of loss; these men are forsaken by their respective lover. Moreover, as Keats’s Knight is bereft of inspiration, so Wilde’s voice is almost absent from these lines. The current author recovers the past, but in so closely imitating ‘La Belle Dame’, his verse becomes indistinguishable from its source. Past elegists, most notably Shelley, Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘avoided becoming Keats [. . .] by transforming, manipulating and disfiguring Keats and his words’ (Epstein, p. 122, original emphasis). Even Alice Meynell and Christina Rossetti garner the subject’s regrowth to serve their own poetic advancement. Wilde rejects the egocentrism of previous elegists, yet his ‘egolessness’ is hardly conducive to creativity. As David Bergman states, ‘This negative




Consuming Keats

identity is not merely an inversion of selfhood – being the opposite of what others expect it to be – but rather an absence of identity.’56 This author’s ‘overturning’ of the elegiac power dynamic only reverses the binary opposition, ‘bring[ing] low what was high’. Wilde therefore maintains a ‘violent hierarchy’, and loses his own sense of Self.57 This is ultimately revealed towards the end of ‘Eros’ when a deflated persona insists that he is ‘the last Endymion’ (227). By proclaiming that he is the one true heir of the Romantic sensibility, Wilde removes any existing boundaries between the subject and the Self. The living author has not obtained his object, but rather been consumed by the past. Wilde’s identity is now symbolically defined and encompassed by the Other; his performance is orchestrated by Keats. The present serves the past and no rebirth is possible. Change is, however, evident as Keats is transformed into the deterministic Self of elegy, a re-embodied subject to contest the poetic primacy of subsequent memorials.

VI Six years after the publication of Wilde’s and Rossetti’s tributes, Thomas Hardy commemorated Keats. ‘Poems of Pilgrimage’, a subsection of Poems of the Past and the Present, were written in 1887 during an extended tour of Italy, but did not appear publicly until 1901 (see ‘At the Pyramid of Cestius Near the Graves of Shelley and Keats’, Appendix 8). In ‘The Pyramid of Cestius’, the first line of the second verse, ‘I can recall no word’, generates an anxious absence (5).58 Hardy immediately expresses doubts about the relation between memory and the poetic medium, problematising the comfortable coexistence of time periods, past and present, within the title of this collection. The poem commences with a question, ‘Who, then, was Cestius, / And what is he to me?’, which undermines the premise of remembrance (1–2). Cestius’s monument fails to counteract the oblivion of death: ‘Whose purpose was exprest / Not with its first design’ (9–10). Hardy ponders on the heroic deeds Cestius may have performed and realises that ‘For me he is a man who died and was interred / To leave a pyramid’ (7–8). Life has become detached from its memorial; the original purpose of the sepulchre has eroded over time, man becoming immaterial to his monument. The commentary on Cestius prefigures the relevance of Keats and Shelley. The title of the elegy locates the reader ‘At the Pyramid of



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Cestius’, thereby relegating the Romantic poets to the status of adjuncts who merely support the ‘ample fame’ of the Protestant Cemetery (24). Evident throughout the poem are the ways in which a physical object, the material memorial, supplants the subject. Keats and Shelley are not referred to by name in the body of the poem – ‘Those matchless singers lie [. . .] where two immortal Shades abide’; and their now well-worn ‘stories’ are by-passed by four ellipses (20, 23). These narratives may have become formulaic, but Hardy simply substitutes repetition with cliché. In direct contrast to Wilde’s physically realised presences, Keats and Shelley are transformed into insubstantial shades, ghostly presences that paradoxically haunt the poem with their virtual absence.59 ‘The Pyramid of Cestius’ represents a rejection of the elegiac genre. Keats is absent from this elegy which saves the dead from another ritual decomposition: yet without this fertile base, an authorial recomposition is impossible. From the desperate bid of Shelley to attain immortality in his poem this final elegy of the nineteenth century deconstructs the inflated ego of the living poet. As in Wilde’s tributes, a superior Self is untenable from such an introverted position. The speaker of ‘The Pyramid of Cestius’ resembles a spectral presence which echoes the depiction of Keats in this poem; the poetic voice is insubstantial and unsure of his role. The position of the Self has been irrevocably undermined. From this point onwards, twentieth-century elegies will recognise Keats as a source of inspiration rather than a poetic rite-of-passage. The only true constant in this chapter has been the poetic act, the impulse to elegise the predecessor. Nineteenthcentury Keats-based elegy is not ultimately dictated by the dead, which has de-prioritised the primacy of the living author, but by a successive and undiminished rebirth in literature.




Pre-Raphaelite Visions of Keats’s Poetry

I The picture has always told me another story, however.1 Keats’s poetry had a profound effect upon nineteenth-century art. Most notably, the Romantic poet was fundamental to the formation of the PRB. Representations of his work are key to our understanding of the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic and the respective fortunes of its founder members; equally, the Keats-based paintings of this movement mark a turning point in the poet’s posthumous career. This chapter will examine Pre-Raphaelite paintings based on Keats’s poetry from two distinct periods of the movement. In Part II, I discuss the PRB’s appreciation of the subversive elements in Keats’s poetry during the formative years of this group. Through an identification with Keats’s life and work, particularly the narrative poems of ‘Isabella, or the Pot of Basil’ and ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais address issues of social and sexual transgression. Later versions of the same literary sources, discussed in Part III, represent the divergence of both first-and second-generation PreRaphaelites from their ‘radical’ origins. Interpretations of Keats’s poetry reflect both the artists’ changing status and a re-evaluation of the literary precursor in accordance with their modified aspirations and achievements. 42



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did the painters, approaching such transgressive subjects, employ Keats’s poems [. . .] to deflect responsibility for these subjects onto a poet who by mid century had acquired the literary authority he had not achieved in his lifetime? Did they seek their own authority by association? Did they wish to appear ‘radical’ or unconventional by association? Beyond their youthful identification with Keats, did they hope their ill-defined program for painting would parallel Keats’s effect on poetry and ensure their success?2 All these questions centre on the issue of status, or more specifically the Pre-Raphaelites’ preoccupation with self-image (Codell’s questions are based on the past’s subservience to the present). In short, Codell is asking what factors governed the Pre-Raphaelites’ interest in Keats, which brings us to the bigger question of whether they were primarily concerned with activism or authority? I attempt to address this issue by recognising that artists’ careers do not remain a constant. Part II of this chapter explores the initial factor Codell identifies, that is radicalism, in relation to the consciously controversial Keats-based art from the brief period between 1848 and 1850; Part III examines a second flourishing of Keats-based art by Hunt and Millais (amongst others) from the 1860s onwards when Pre-Raphaelitism had achieved mainstream credibility. Apparent in both Codell’s questions and my approach is the significance of cultural and social issues. In addition, three further factors will be instrumental in ascertaining the nature of the relationship between Keats and the Pre-Raphaelites. First, I will be addressing aesthetic concerns. A creative interpretation of the poetic source, that is an artistic interaction with Keats that engages with the issue of medium, usually results in a thought-provoking or ‘productive’ painting. Secondly, the word ‘productive’ raises the subject of economics: as consumer objects, both visually and in terms of marketable value, Hunt’s and Millais’s paintings will be discussed in terms of aesthetic gain/loss and profitability. However, even though the discourse of artistic and economic ‘productivity’ suggests an inherent interrelatedness, they are not synonymous. For instance, a ‘productive’ interpretation of Keats’s work does not necessarily



Julie Codell concludes her essay on ‘Painting Keats’ with the following speculations:

Consuming Keats

result in a saleable painting. In fact, for the Pre-Raphaelites to attain financial viability after the ‘poor’ critical reception of their early work, they figuratively ‘waste’ some of their former aesthetic success. Finally, the third issue connecting Keats and the Pre-Raphaelites is sex: not a homosexual desire or homosocial bond, which will direct Rossetti’s relationships with artists and authors in Chapter 3, but a thematic affinity. The provocative issue of sexuality directs my analysis of Hunt’s painting ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, and foregrounds the main discussion of parallels between Keats’s poem ‘Isabella’ and PreRaphaelite interpretations. Revisiting the same issues in Part III highlights a loss of kinship between poet and painter as Hunt and Millais attempt to establish the authority that Codell refers to in the quotation above. Before examining any of these concerns in detail, however, it is necessary to outline the initial importance of Keats to the PRB. Prior to the publication of Monckton Milnes’s Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats in the summer of 1848, Keats was still a relatively obscure poet. However, in 1847, a young aspiring artist acquired an edition of the poet’s verse in ‘book-bins labeled “this lot 4d.” ’.3 William Holman Hunt acquainted his new associate, John Everett Millais, with this ‘discovery’ and began work on the first Hunt–Keats collaboration, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’. Even though Hunt claims the painting was ‘hung somewhat high up in the Architectural Room’ of the Royal Academy, it received a prize of £70 and the attention of a fellow Keats enthusiast. Hunt recalls, Rossetti came up to me, repeating with emphasis his praise, and loudly declaring that my picture of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ was the best in the collection. Probably the fact that the subject was taken from Keats made him the more unrestrained. G. H. Fleming describes Rossetti’s delight at seeing this painting, and states: ‘But for John Keats, the two men might never have come together’ (Millais, p. 40). Hunt himself claims that ‘our common enthusiasm for Keats brought us together’, forging an intimacy between unlikely allies with disparate views on artistic execution and purpose. George H. Ford states that this Keatsian kinship provided the catalyst for the formation of the PRB, ‘a group in which an admiration for Keats was almost a badge of membership’.4



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The poet’s enthusiasm for early Italian art even suggested the name of the movement Keats believed that ‘Specimens of the first and second age of art in Italy’ surpassed subsequent accomplishments ‘not excepting Raphael’s’.5 Fleming states, ‘for Rossetti, having just read about Keats’s response to painters preceding Raphael, it would have been natural to suggest “Pre-Raphaelite”. And so, provisionally, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood came into existence’ (Millais, p. 44). Therefore, Keats’s poetry prompted a visual experience over which the founder members of the Brotherhood could ‘bond’, and also determined the aesthetic direction of the movement.6 One of the immediate concerns of this chapter is to ascertain why Keats was so significant to the Pre-Raphaelites. Ford states that the Brotherhood’s mutual appreciation issued from ‘the pictorial qualities of his poetry’.7 Hunt was delighted to find poetry so ‘brimful of beauties’, and Rossetti wrote to William Morris, ‘the next Keats must be a painter’.8 In general, the transposition of word into image was not a matter of semantic or aesthetic concern for the Victorians: artists were simply ‘copying poetry in painting’. 9 The booming business, or ‘insatiable market’, of book illustration reinforced the idea that prosaic painters merely paraphrased verse within the spatial limitations of the canvas.10 It was Arthur Henry Hallam who first ‘identified the attraction of artists to poets such as Keats and Tennyson’: they avoided intellectual contemplation and embraced a ‘picturesque delineation of objects’.11 The ‘pictorial’ elements of Keats’s poems were similarly the subject of praise amongst contemporary reviewers; one critic envisaged ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ as a ray of sunlight falling ‘gorgeously and delicately upon us’ whilst being refracted through ‘the colours of the painted glass’.12 Describing the visual immediacy or ornateness of this poem has remained a common feature of criticism. Robert Gittings views ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ as ‘a series of medieval pictures, giving a fresh view of the same story from stanza to stanza, like some jeweled fresco from a church wall’, and Jack Stillinger writes, ‘for the art interests of the later nineteenth century, no writer created so many pictures in poetry since Spenser and Shakespeare [. . .] He [Keats] filled poems such as Isabella and The Eve of St. Agnes with gorgeous, exquisitely detailed pictures that could be transferred, as it were, directly onto the painters’ canvases.’13 The image of Keats painting his text is a common conceit; for example,




Consuming Keats

Clive Marsland envisages Keats at the artist’s easel, subjugating the word to the supremacy of colour and texture.14 Marjorie Levinson associates these examples of creative empathy with what she refers to as ‘the romantic tapestry school’, and objects to the parallels drawn between poetry and weavings which are ‘flat, stylized, and concretely allegorical’.15 Such ‘reductively hedonistic arguments’ are evidence, to Levinson, of an approach that has forfeited its critical edge. Gittings, Marsland and Douglas Bush represent one side of the ‘single principle of diversity’ upon which, Levinson claims, criticism on Keats has evolved: discourse versus meaning. A basic tenet of this chapter, and the book in general, is that medium does not operate against the content of a work; rather, the process of interpretation from word to image generates new works of art and insights into the text.16 Regardless of how the artist views his literary subject, Keats’s verse cannot be ‘translated’ into the visual imagery of a painting. F. G. Stephens recognised that the Pre-Raphaelites’ appreciation of Keats amounted to more than ‘picture poetry’. Above all, they determined these pictures should at least mean something; be no longer the false representations of sham sentiment, but express thought, feeling or purpose of the painter’s own mind, not a chromatic translation of a novelist or poet.17 Furthermore, poetry composed in 1818 cannot be ‘emptied’ of its contemporary relevance and simply re-inscribed in the mid-Victorian period. No approach to Victorian narrative paintings should overlook either the issue of medium or the specific context in which each respective artwork and its source were produced. Marcia Pointon rejects the possibility that ‘Keats is, or can be, a source in any simple sense’; no text or image should be viewed as merely supportive or ‘aesthetically neutral’.18 Both word and image represent an act with social, historical and theoretical consequences. Creativity thereby results from the coalescence and conflict between artists and authors working under different cultural conditions (our location in the present as viewer or reader adds another dimension). Therefore, the relationship between the source and its interpretation can only be determined by an approach which recognises multiple perspectives rather than the simplistic opposition of discourse versus meaning that Levinson critiques. I will begin with a brief discussion



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II The representation of Madeline and Porphyro in Hunt’s ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ (1848) captures the caution of the lovers in the denouement of Keats’s poem and, in the contorted pose of the Porter, his ‘uneasy sprawl’ (‘The Eve of St Agnes’, 363, Plate 2). Hunt also incorporates ‘the bloated wassailers’ into the scene of the escaping lovers – seen through the framed recesses on the left-hand side of the composition – who by the penultimate stanza of Keats’s poem have already drunk themselves into oblivion (346). Hunt’s manipulation of the source, his rearrangement of Keats’s narrative order, creates a culminatory moment which illustrates the artist’s didactic interpretation of the poem: ‘the sacredness of honest responsible love and the weakness of proud intemperance’ (the painting was originally entitled

Plate 2 William Holman Hunt, The Eve of St Agnes. 1848. National Museums Liverpool (The Walker).



of the first Pre-Raphaelite painting of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ to demonstrate the complex ways in which an artist interacts with his literary source.

Consuming Keats

‘The Flight of Madeline and Porphyro During the Drunkenness Attending the Revelry’, Pre-Raphaelitism, p. 85). Hunt is therefore, refashioning Keats after his own moral vision, effectively circumventing the ripe sensuality at the poem’s epicentre. Codell, for instance, perceives the painting as a deliberate misreading: ‘Hunt’s selection of the escape scene avoids the poem’s complex emotional responses and counterresponses of the bedroom and any direct depiction of the topics of sexual desire, consummation, and seduction.’19 Whilst Codell acknowledges that the Pre-Raphaelites’ employment of Keats provided a means exploring ‘transgressive desire through painterly conventions’, by accepting what Wayne Cook describes as Hunt’s ‘superficial reading of his work [. . .] Doubtless to protect himself against Victorian disapproval’20, she also argues that Hunt was too ‘squeamish’ to engage directly with Porphyro’s act of violation (‘Painting Keats’, pp. 341, 351). Nevertheless, the focus of the painting is undeniably sexual. The physical proximity of the lovers forms a suggestive intimacy – reminding the viewer of their ‘encounter’ prior to the escape scene in Keats’s poem – while sexual energy is generated by the phallicism discernible in the hero’s clasped hilt and the belt dangling between his thighs. The colour of Madeline’s gown is also suggestive of carnal intent. Critics, including Cook and Richard Harter Fogle, comment on the predominance of purple in Keats’s poetry, and the PreRaphaelites’ interest in this colour is equally apparent.21 When discussing ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ and the formation of the Brotherhood, Judith Bronkhurst suggests that Rossetti ‘was probably struck by Hunt’s use of purple in Madeline’s robe as well as by the Keatsian theme’ (p. 58). For both the poet and the painter, the colour is not incidental; purple signifies sexual intent or an illicit experience. in his pained heart Made purple riot; then doth he propose A strategem, that makes the beldame start. [. . .] Into her dream he melted, as the rose Blendeth its odour with the violet. (‘The Eve of St Agnes’, 137–9, 320–1) Rather than a self-styled didacticism, Hunt’s appreciation of Keats consists of a complete immersion in the sensual evocativeness



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of ‘Eve’, which awakened the painter to the ambiguity inherent within the text. Andrew Graham-Dixon dismisses the PRB as a ‘temporary gang of young men who thought about nothing much else but sex’, yet Keats’s influence on this group extended beyond the sexually suggestive to the political.22 Hunt’s first painting to bear the initials PRB, ‘Rienzi’ (1849), is indebted to Keats’s rather seditious ideology expressed in his epic fragment Hyperion. The work was not only inspired by Bulwer Lytton’s novel Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes, but by Oceanus’s speech on ‘Nature’s law’ (Book II, 181). This passage had a profound effect on Hunt and, along with Ruskin’s Modern Painters, formed the basis of a progressive theory on the history of art.23 In Hyperion, Oceanus encourages the old gods, Saturn and Hyperion, to accept their fate and ‘be content to stoop’ (178). He has discovered the ‘eternal truth’ (187) that the younger generation will supplant the existing order: ‘So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, / A power more strong in beauty, born of us / And fated to excel us’ (212–14). Hunt’s reading of this poem, in line with the general tendency of interpreters within this book, focuses on the primacy of the present. Read, my dear fellow, the address of Oceanus in Keats’s Hyperion, and you will see how the course of life on creation’s lines is inevitably progressive and only under debasing influence retrogressive [. . .] Every age brings new knowledge into the world: the artists of the past days imagined and composed their works for the intelligence of their contemporaries, and we should work with equal desire to address the intelligence of our own day. (Pre-Raphaelitism, I, p. 87) The old should submit to the young; the present should harness the strength of precursors, artists of the recent past, but not be burdened by their edicts (most likely directed at Joshua Reynolds who died at the end of the eighteenth century yet left a lasting legacy on the practice of the Academy). Partly as a response to Keats’s poem, Hunt argues that artistic energy should be channeled into a bid to overthrow the past. Similarly, Millais’s first painting to bear the cryptic initials of the Brotherhood was inspired by Keats’s poetry. The pendant piece to Hunt’s ‘Rienzi’, ‘Isabella and Lorenzo’ represents a pictorial response




Consuming Keats

to Keats’s controversial discourse of class and anti-authoritarianism (thus facilitating an attack on the very establishment where the painting was exhibited – the Royal Academy in 1849). The painting ostensibly illustrates a scene which is briefly alluded to in the first stanza of Keats’s poem: ‘They could not sit at meals but feel how well / It soothed each to be the other by’ (5–6, Plate 3). Many Pre-Raphaelite commentators, including Christopher Wood, quote these lines as an adequate explanation of the connection between the poetic source and the painting. Russell Ash and Steven Adams include a brief synopsis of Keats’s story without commenting on its relation to the image, and Graham-Dixon suggests that any interaction between the poem and the painting is ‘too tedious to rehearse in detail’.24 Likewise, Cook states that ‘Isabella and Lorenzo’ represents a ‘simple moral reading’: yet as I indicated at the beginning of this chapter, a monologic transference of Keats’s words from the page onto the canvas is not possible. Rather, Millais has created a kind of montage which condenses the artist’s selective and subjective reading of Keats’s poem.

Plate 3 John Everett Millais, Isabella and Lorenzo. 1849. National Museums Liverpool (The Walker).



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‘Isabella and Lorenzo’ centres on the theme of consumption. The scene is one of dining, yet no substantial nourishment is offered. An overwhelming appetite for social superiority supersedes the actual activity of eating: a greed, not for food but position, undermines the convivial atmosphere usually attendant at communal meals. Human necessities such as food are sacrificed, with the silver urn and majolica plates serving as permanent displays of the brothers’ wealth. Yet no one appears hungry, preferring to exhibit a polite restraint or abstinence that will reinforce their breeding; an appetite for base necessities would be crude and vulgar but social avarice is acceptable. Recalling Keats’s description of the conspirators as ‘Great wits’, Millais’s rendering of the brothers realises a portrait of restrained hatred with one brother observing Lorenzo through his blood-redcoloured wine, while the prominent, foreground figure reflects the brutality and rashness that leads them to criminal actions and eventual exile (‘Isabella’, 136). His heavy-handed uncouthness and violence is symbolised in the spilt salt below his elbow and the carelessly discarded nuts – demonstrative actions reflecting the brothers’ collective waste of social and economic status in the denouement of Keats’s poem. Millais’s painting is primarily noticeable for its binary oppositions. As Lynne Pearce states, ‘wittingly or unwittingly, it replicates the ideological differences implicit in Keats’s retelling of that story, and makes them graphic with a startling directness’.25 Paradoxically, it is the painting’s compositional balance, or what Cook describes as a ‘democracy of detail’, which supports the despotic household politics (‘Keats and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’, p. 7). However, rather than Millais’s painting constructing simple, and somewhat superficial, oppositions, the threat of violence, social aspirations and suppressed sexual passions form a complex and hierarchical series of public and private agendas. ‘Isabella and Lorenzo’ does not merely involve a ‘dichotomy between emotional purity and commercial motives’ as Codell suggests, the façade of a neat thematic equilibrium between virtue and vice, but consists of localised conflicts that can be viewed from more than one perspective (‘Painting Keats’, p. 347). The aggression of the prominent brother infects the scene of Millais’s painting with a tense expectancy, a discomfort discernible on the guests’ faces. Yet his oppressive glare and body language is not universally denounced by either the internal audience of the painting – that is,




Consuming Keats

the row of diners on the right of the painting – or the external audience of the viewing public. Rather, respect is demanded for his awe-inspiring presence. In other words, the brothers provide the focus of interest and anticipation in this painting with the foreground figure, in particular, absorbing the attention of the viewer: ‘This figure extends his unwieldy legs to the immediate front of the picture so as not merely to divide attention with, but to appropriate all attention from the love-sick Lorenzo and the fair Isabel.’26 Essentially, the brothers are vital, as indicated by their bold, primary coloured clothes, in contrast to the pale lovers whose insipid pastels and smooth silks only serve to exacerbate their dreary demeanors. As Pearce states, Lorenzo’s ‘face is inflicted with the same tenderness and vulnerability’ as Isabella’s, accentuating the hero’s ‘relative androgyny. For not only does Lorenzo’s person complement Isabella’s femininity, it also highlights the extreme masculinity of the foreground brother’ (Woman/Image/Text, p. 96, original emphasis). In terms of the gender politics outlined in the previous chapter, Lorenzo adopts the position of passive receptor to another man’s insertor – the phallic thrust of the brother’s leg acting as a visual embodiment of this relation. Millais’s painting therefore evokes the following questions: why is our attention not directed to the focus of Keats’s story, the lovers; why don’t we empathise with this haven of innocence and peace in a threatening, corrupt household; why has the artist tainted Lorenzo with a freakish, even malignant streak, and depicted Isabella with an aura of frigidity and weakness comparable to that of the cowering dog crushed against her legs? Above all, are these issues rooted in a reading of Keats’s narrative, or are they the imaginative property of the artist? An analysis of Keats’s ‘Isabella’ will begin to address these problems. The stanzas introducing Isabella and Lorenzo establish the Romantic framework of the poem, yet an ironic detachment is evident which immediately checks the reader’s sympathy for the hero and heroine. The opening lines border on cliché: ‘Fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel! / Lorenzo, a young palmer in Love’s eye!’ (1–2). The exclamation marks not only suggest Keats’s semi-parodic regard for his sentimental lovers, but the genre he is working within. Later in the poem, Keats’s frustration becomes increasingly evident as Isabella and Lorenzo’s self-absorption blinds them to the penetrative glare of the enemy. The lovers belong to



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With her rich brothers this fair lady dwelt, Enriched from ancestral merchandise, And for them many a weary hand did swelt In torched mines and noisy factories, And many once proud-quivered loins did melt In blood from stinging whip – with hollow eyes Many all day in dazzling river stood To take the rich-ored driftings of the flood. For them the Ceylon diver held his breath, And went all naked to the hungry shark; For them his ears gushed blood; for them in death The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark Lay full of darts; for them alone did seethe A thousand men in troubles wide and dark: Half-ignorant, they turned an easy wheel, That set sharp racks at work to pinch and peel. (105–20) These stanzas are generally quoted as a critique of capitalism. Keats’s empathy with the workers’ plight is, however, at odds with his compelling desire to experiment with poetic sensations. In these stanzas, the brothers’ lack of humanity paradoxically produces keen and vivid imagery. Often overlooked is the way in which Keats lingers over the feel of the ‘stinging whip’ while the ‘proud-quivered loins’ of the workers melt like the ‘inward fragrance’ of the lovers’ hearts (76). Such sensuous images of pain evoke feelings of perverse pleasure. Most disturbing is the exotically enticing description of the ‘Ceylon diver [. . .] all naked’ satisfying the appetite of the ‘hungry shark’ – a displaced metaphor for the relation between the consumer and the consumed. Keats’s attraction to this ‘killer instinct’ darkens his verse with an unmistakable depravity as the diver is divested of his humanity and, ultimately, his life. This bewildering spectacle, cataloguing the brothers’ business interests, constitutes a sensory array: the close workhouses are juxtaposed against the ‘cold ice’ of the deep while the ‘dazzling



an old order, a bygone age of minstrels and lays, which the author laments whilst simultaneously being drawn to the thrilling attractions of a new world of endeavour and exploitation.

Consuming Keats

river’ promises precious metals. As the brothers extract ‘the richored driftings of the flood’, so Keats is plumbing the potential of his poetic resource. Keats presumptuously advised Shelley to ‘load every rift of your subject with ore [to] be more of an artist’, revealing his equation of exploiting language with the brothers’ assets.27 The literal wealth of the masters is matched by the metaphoric wealth of poetry. Money generated metaphors in Keats’s mind as early as 1817, the year before he began ‘Isabella’, when he referred to bills as ‘a nettle leaf or two in your bed’ (11 May 1817). Likewise, in ‘Isabella’, a linguistic balancing of profit and loss is discernible: we’ll gain / Out of the amorous dark what day doth borrow’ (205–6). Although, for Keats, poetry would ideally transcend trade – symbolised by Lorenzo’s severed head, a decaying object that should be unprofitable waste yet attracts the emotional investment of Isabella and bankrupts her brothers – by invoking a capitalist discourse, he associates his ambitions and terms of achievement with the ‘enemy’. Both employ their respective talents, in business and literary composition, for gain: words, like the brothers’ slaves, can accrue social and financial rewards. Elizabeth Jones claims that Keats’s concern for the marketability of his poetic ‘goods’ became fetishistic – a word with distinct overtones of depravity – which culminated, in the spring of 1819 (just a year after ‘Isabella’ was written), with the completion of a commercially motivated product: ‘the subject of the odes are commodified and packaged for public consumption’.28 Similarly, Kurt Heinzelman describes Keats’s poetry as ‘fetishized’, and traces the poet’s appreciation of a literary economics to the summer of 1809 when the poet was awarded a copy of C. H. Kaufmann’s Dictionary of Merchandise . . . for the use of Counting Houses as a prize for some Latin and Greek translations.29 Heinzelman suggests that ‘Keats too can sometimes seem a literary Kaufmann, totting up a poetic catalogue of cultural artefacts’ (‘Self-Interest and the Politics of Composition’, p. 159).30 This early relation between writing and merchandise or earnings is connected with translation, and suggests, for Keats, an association between re-interpretation and achievement. In short, Keats intended to repeat his former success by retelling a story from Boccaccio’s The Decameron. Furthermore, Susan Wolfson notes the poet’s deliberate



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change of setting for ‘Isabella’ from Messina to Florence, a city ‘renowned for busy commercial enterprise’ and the growth of Italy’s staple crop, the olive tree, whose value as a commodity is equated with heroine’s personal worth.31 It is the brothers who envisage marrying Isabella for a lucrative yield but, from Wolfson’s perspective, the poet is equally mercenary. As the brothers view their sister as marketable property, so Keats regards his ‘Isabella’ in terms of prospective literary and financial returns. Therefore, if Keats was consciously mining Boccaccio’s tale for its potential rewards, a textual enactment of the brothers’ exploitative business practice, is it not equally possible that such considerations motivated Millais’s painting ‘Isabella and Lorenzo’? As Keats’s apparent anti-capitalism conversely signifies his literary and social aspirations, what factors determined the prioritisation of the brothers in Millais’s first Pre-Raphaelite work? Given Wolfson’s position on ‘Isabella’, it should be noted that the verso accompanying the painting in the exhibition catalogue concludes with the couplet: When ‘twas their plan to coax her by degrees To some high noble and his olive trees. (167–8) William Michael Rossetti described the poem ‘Isabella’ as ‘more ambitious [. . .] than is needed’, and a reviewer for the Literary Gazette similarly commented on the ‘aspiring’ nature of Millais’s work.32 Tellingly, Hunt’s descriptions of contemporary reactions to ‘Isabella and Lorenzo’ centre on the ‘pretension’ of the painting and praise for the ‘exquisite’ colour and details of the majolica plates. Thus, Millais’s first ‘radical’ work, signalling his departure from the establishment, was acclaimed for its literal and metaphorical ‘richness’. Equally, Hunt’s regard for his own career as an artist can be described as ambitious. As Keats’s early narrative poem was inspired by wellknown and marketable literature, so Hunt’s first major oil painting, ‘Little Nell and Her Grandfather’ (1845), capitalised on the success of Dickens’s novel The Old Curiosity Shop. In addition, although ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ constitutes a subversive response to a relatively obscure poet, Hunt’s decision to produce another literary painting suggests economic inducements. Ironically, therefore, in one respect, the work




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upon which the Brotherhood was founded represents ‘a direct appeal to popular taste’ (Amor, p. 28).33 Like Keats’s poem and Millais’s painting, Hunt’s sketch, ‘Lorenzo at his Desk in the Warehouse’ (1848–50), ostensibly presents the brothers as the enemy (Plate 4).34 They are shown as ‘harsh taskmasters, not only in the imperious gesture and scowling countenance of the brother in the centre of the background, which reduces one employee to tears’, but also in the glimpses of the exploited workforce crowded into corners and visible beneath the trapdoor in the floor.35 Isabella’s brothers are, once again, central to the composition and, as in Millais’s painting, their prominence raises the issues of class and capitalism. Lorenzo’s subordinate situation echoes Hunt’s previous occupation as a copying clerk in the city but, as with Keats, artist’s empathy is marred by ambivalence.36 Although an employee of the brothers, Lorenzo is not engaged in manual labour – he is occupied with deskwork. There is a definite hierarchy amongst the workers in both Hunt’s sketch and Millais’s painting. In the latter, Lorenzo is scorned by the brothers for forming a relationship with Isabella, yet he still dines with the family and is waited upon by the

Plate 4 William Holman Hunt, Lorenzo at his Desk in the Warehouse. 1848–50. Photo RMN/© Gérard Blot.



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servant to the right of the painting. In Keats’s poem, Lorenzo ‘toil[s]’, but is also able to rest when the brothers find him ‘in the quiet of content’ (‘Isabella’, 140, 181). Keats describes Lorenzo as ‘the servant of their [the brothers’] trade designs’, a draughtsman: neither labourer nor master, his social limbo provides a parallel with the positions of both Keats and Hunt. In ‘Lorenzo at his Desk in the Warehouse’, the protagonist is situated below a shelf of books, denoting his literacy, and the brother nearest to Lorenzo keenly examines his papers; symbolically, their heads are bent together indicating a common purpose and intellectual parity. Lorenzo’s primary interest in business is conveyed through his bodily gestures: his upper torso and legs curl away from Isabella and point towards the inner-workings of the factory. Isabella is relatively inconsequential; she is peripheralised, while the brothers’ expanding commercial enterprise dominates both Lorenzo’s and the viewer’s field of vision. Therefore, the vertical line of the door bars physical contact with the beloved. The romance plot is effectively denied entrance by the marked parameters of the capitalist arena, a space which both the brothers and Lorenzo share. As I discussed in relation to Millais’s painting, Isabella’s brothers should evoke our condemnation, yet in no interpretation of this time are the lovers prioritised. The theme of injustice is accompanied by a visual discourse of personal ambition which has its origins in the source text. As ‘O for a Life of Sensations rather than Thoughts!’ has been read as indicative of Keats’s disinterested sensibility, so the PRB has traditionally been viewed as an idealistic group whose motivations transcend commercial incentives (22 November 1817).37 Jan Marsh proposes that the message of Hunt’s sketch is one of ‘love overcoming obstacles’, even though, as I have demonstrated, Isabella cannot gain access to Lorenzo’s physical and mental domain.38 Along similar lines, Bronkhurst claims that the setting of the scene in a warehouse was ‘based on Keats’ sneering reference to the brothers as ‘ledger-men’, and Cook views the entire poem as demonstrating ‘the cost of greed and power’ (‘Keats and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’, p. 19).39 In stark contrast, Codell claims that both Hunt’s drawing and his painting ‘Eve’ were ‘tied to market expectations’ (even though the drawing was still in Hunt’s possession at an exhibition of his paintings in 1910, ‘Painting Keats’, p. 363). In her eagerness to provide a materialist antidote to prevailing romantic perceptions of Pre-Raphaelitism, Codell neglects what




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Graham-Dixon describes as ‘the authentic ring of gauche student idealism’ that characterises their early work (History of British Art, p. 175). To reapply Levinson’s model of Keats’s critical heritage, Codell, Bronkhurst, Cook and Marsh judge Pre-Raphaelite art, albeit from different perspectives, on a ‘single principle of diversity’ – pragmatism versus idealism. Yet, at this point in the painters’ careers, aesthetics and economics were inextricably linked. For example, when Hunt was painting his first work based on Keats’s poetry, he was also engaged in the production of small portraits for profit. Such circumstances do not detract from the artistic appeal of ‘Eve’, but rather add an extra dimension of critical interest. Whether motivated by mercenary or artistic priorities, what has emerged from this section are the ways in which both Millais’s and Hunt’s visual interpretations perceive and respond to the potential of Keats’s sexual and political subtexts.

III Unlike Keats, however, the Pre-Raphaelites enjoyed lengthy careers during which their ambitions were realised. Only four years after Millais exhibited ‘Isabella and Lorenzo’ at the Royal Academy, the original Brotherhood disbanded. In response to the news that Millais had become an Associate Academician, a member of the institution he had recently opposed, Rossetti exclaimed ‘so now the whole Round Table is dissolved’.40 Millais was by far the most conventionally successful of the original Brotherhood. In December 1863, Millais became a Royal Academician and in February 1896 he was elected president of the Royal Academy. He retained the post for only a few months but, as Hunt wrote to him in congratulation, he had ‘gone a letter higher – from PRB to PRA’, marking the move from ostracised outsider to established master.41 Jason Rosenfeld states that at the time of his death, shortly after becoming president of the Royal Academy, ‘there was no more lauded artist in Britain’ (Other Masters, p. 46), a position which Alan Bowness sees as assured some forty years before, By 1856 Millais was the most influential painter at work in England, and the Academy exhibitions of the 1850s are full of Millaisian paining. When we speak of Pre-Raphaelite influence at this date we generally mean Millais – Bowler and Burton, Wallis



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and Windus, Arthur Hughes, Dyce for a time – a whole generation of younger painters (and some older ones) fall under Millais’ spell. Scarcely anyone was immune: ‘Autumn Leaves’ provided the starting point for Whistler. (The Pre-Raphaelites, pp. 20–1) In terms of financial success, Millais’s later paintings typically sold for in excess of £3,000; and in 1863, the year he exhibited ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, the artist exclaimed, ‘there is no reason why I shouldn’t make 5000 this year’ (Millais, p. 205).42 To a lesser extent, Hunt’s fortunes improved after the Brotherhood disbanded, yet the artist continued to present an image of himself as a subversive. Codell claims, ‘Hunt maintained this rebellious posture despite success, because it was the posture to which all artists were socialized.’43 In fact, Hunt was a ‘negotiator of lucrative business deals’, engaged in ‘bulling up the market’ to raise the price of his work, exaggerating hardships to justify the high sums being paid, while also producing pot-boiler replicas of these originals to increase the profitability of his compositions (‘The Artist Colonized’, pp. 219, 215). Perhaps Hunt’s best ‘result’ with his self-help ethic came in 1860 when ‘The Finding of the Saviour’ was sold for a staggering five and a half thousand pounds (the highest price paid to a living artist by that date). As mentioned earlier in the chapter, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ won a prize of £70 in 1848 and was bought by Gambart for £168 ten years later, whereas Hunt’s full-length portrait of Isabella (1867) was purchased upon completion by the same art dealer for £2,500, a figure as significant to our reading of the painting as the heroine herself (Plate 5). In Hunt’s return to Keats’s ‘Isabella’, social commentary is now exchanged for the personal politics of wealth. The beautiful furnishings reflect the artist’s investment in his work; the accumulation of details – inlaid wood, marble floors and gleaming silver – indicates his own, rather than a character’s, status. In stark contrast to the rustic earthenware pot discernible on the balcony to the right of the heroine in Millais’s ‘Isabella and Lorenzo’, the majolica pot in Hunt’s rendering is an elaborate vase which was designed and painted by the artist himself.44 By this point in his career, Hunt was investing in objéts d’ârt, particularly majolica, for its appreciable value.45 The glare of riches, which Hunt employed as a critique of the middle classes in ‘The Awakening Conscience’ (1853–4), here defines the artist as nouveau-riche.




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Plate 5 William Holman Hunt, Isabella and the Pot of Basil. 1867. Laing Art Gallery (Tyne and Wear Museums).

In this painting, Hunt ironically embraces a characteristic which he subsequently professes a desire to see eradicated from English art: decadence.46 The content of the painting, its marketability and the circumstances which inspired the work, reinforce the primary importance of profit over loss. While waiting for a ship to take him on a second



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trip to Palestine, Hunt’s wife, Fanny, died of miliary fever shortly after giving birth to a son. Hunt’s grief did not, however, prevent him from working; in fact, the death of his wife prompted a period of intense activity. Fanny’s consumptive disease stationed the travellers in Florence, a factor which proved conducive for recalling Keats’s tale of wasted love. As Isabella reclaimed her passion for Lorenzo through part of his lifeless body, so the embodiment of Hunt’s wife on canvas acts as a substitute. Yet Hunt did not paint this picture as a private memorial to his wife: ‘Isabella’ was intended for public display.47 Codell notes how Hunt’s references to Fanny in his autobiography are marked ‘with rows of asterisks representing his wife’s presence-as-absence’ (‘The Artist Colonized’, p. 213). Similarly, ‘Isabella’ does not constitute a personal tribute, but rather erases the spouse’s familiar identity and transposes a fictional narrative onto her body. The depersonalisation of the work and allusion to Keats’s poem enhance the economic prospect of this work, and the pseudo-memorial is sold to the highest bidder. Instead of an ambivalent attraction to the wealth and status of the brothers in Keats’s ‘Isabella’ as demonstrated in his earlier sketch, Hunt now allies himself with their creed in the act of equating a woman, in this instance his wife rather than a sister, with her material worth. However, even though a real woman is replaced with a fictional heroine, the figure of Isabella is undoubtedly the foars of Hunt’s painting. In contrast to Keats’s Isabella, Hunt’s heroine is not constantly weeping or anorexically self-consumptive. Like the basil plant she enfolds, this Isabella is thriving; she is a robust woman in stark contrast to the pale, retiring maids of earlier Pre-Raphaelite work. Describing Hunt’s painting, Codell suggests, ‘Isabella’s physicality may also represent her sexual awakening and her capacity for physical love’ (‘Painting Keats’, p. 361). The patterned rug which has slipped from her waist reveals a transparent dress through which we can discern both her dark pubic hair and the radiance of her skin’s texture. In this painting, female sexuality is paradoxically equated with death and material riches (the latter themes are visually twinned in the adornment of the majolica urn with skull-head handles). Primarily, Hunt emphasises the luxuriance of Lorenzo’s decomposition in the rich ornamentation of the painting and the thriving bush that has germinated out of his murder. His severed head is indeed a ‘prize’




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for the heroine, which she sensuously tends with her caressing fingers (‘Isabella’, 402). Isabella’s opulent hair not only drapes, as in Keats’s poem, but intertwines with soil enriched by nutrients from Lorenzo’s decaying form. The subtext of death regenerating life, or loss generating gain, is not at odds with Keats’s poem or his literary source. Boccaccio’s tales were written in the fourteenth century when the Black Death killed over fifty million people throughout Europe and Asia.48 In his introduction to The Decameron, the author depicts the terrifying carnage caused by the plague and laments the waste of life and property: yet this disruption to ‘civilised’ society facilitates the creative freedom that Pompinea and her companions enjoy. Many of the tales describe fantastical, erotic encounters and a greed for money and power, which forms a parallel with the interrelated themes of sex and wealth in Keats’s poem and Hunt’s painting. Furthermore, like Boccaccio, Keats’s tale of death, disease and desire generates lasting verse. The loss of the hero and heroine is countered by a final stanza which acknowledges the folktales that inspired The Decameron. No heart was there in Florence but did mourn In pity of her love, so overcast. And a sad ditty on this story born From mouth to mouth through all the country passed: Still is the burthen sung – ‘O cruelty, To steal my basil-pot away from me!’ (499–504) As Isabella nurtures Lorenzo’s remains, so the Florentine community remember their heroine through the transmission and cultivation of her tale. As in Chapter 1, death precipitates birth; Isabella is reborn into a literary life. Accordingly, Hunt translates loss into gain, but how artistically ‘productive’ is ‘Isabella’? First, in terms of the painting’s history, the birth of a son occasioned the death of Fanny Holman Hunt, suggesting an inversion of this creative process. Secondly, the scene selected by Hunt may prioritise the growth of Lorenzo’s head after death, but the concealed object reminds the viewer of the unnatural acts of murder, disinterment and decapitation. Lorenzo’s metonymic ‘afterlife’ – comparable with Keats’s absent presence in elegies – also precipitates



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the heroine’s demise (like a surrogate child, the dead lover’s remains demand constant nurturing). Ostensibly a picture of consolation and renewal, this scene is constructed around an infectious and festering consumption, a perverse growth which undermines all other life. In line with this interpretation, Pearce compares Hunt’s ‘Isabella’ unfavourably with Millais’s earlier interpretation of the source: what is memorable about the painting is the paralleling of Isabella’s morbid introspection in the oppressive fabrics and furnishings with which she is surrounded. Focusing on only one moment in the narrative, however, and on Isabella lost to the monomania of her desire, it offers fewer possibilities for productive explication than Millais’s startling juxtapositions of form, character and ideology [‘Isabella and Lorenzo’]. (Woman/Image/Text, p. 98) Hunt’s ‘rich’ interior paradoxically results in an aesthetic poverty. The gains accrued from this work – largely financial – can conversely be read as loss. The viewer is invited to penetrate the dark recesses of bereavement, both Isabella’s and the artist’s, while being directed to the necrophiliac union between the heroine and her beloved corpse. This forbidden desire is also present in Keats’s poem. After the early inhibitions of the lovers are counteracted by Lorenzo’s death, Isabella nurtures her sexual substitute; the sensual description of the silken scarf, which enfolds Lorenzo’s member in ‘odorous ooze’, suggests an interchange of bodily fluids (‘Isabella’, 411). Codell states that ‘even in this gruesome scene the sensuality of fine cloth, perfumes, and oils are ritually acknowledged’ (‘Painting Keats’, p. 360). The scattering of roses and passion flowers on the exquisitely crafted altar-cloth contribute to the feeling of a profane sexual communion. In Keats’s poem, such spurious pleasures stimulate Isabella’s distraught nerves while gradually consuming her vitality, unlike Hunt’s painting in which Lorenzo’s death generates an invigorating eroticism that ‘fleshes out’ the heroine. Keats’s Isabella remains an ambiguous figure whose paradoxical fruition entails a disquieting and undiagnosable wasting disease, whereas Hunt’s ‘stunner’ circumvents such semantic perplexity by satisfying the appetite of a consumer clientele (the artist himself described ‘Isabella’ as a ‘delicious subject’).49 Hunt extracts the valuable ‘meat’ of Keats’s narrative to feed an audience hungry for semi-clad




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maidens veiled in the propriety of a literary discourse. This glutinous display wastes Keats’s visual and semantic potential, and signals a general trend towards degeneracy in the art of the Pre-Raphaelites. John Melhuish Strudwick’s ‘Isabella’ of 1879, for example, features another striking, columnar figure whose body is overtly sexualized; in particular, a strategically positioned gown and hand accentuate her breasts (Plate 6). Echoing the eroticism of the scenes represented on

Plate 6 John Melhuish Strudwick, Isabella. 1879. © Christie’s Images Ltd (2006).



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the marble inlay behind her and the bronze shield to the left of the composition, Isabella’s pose suggests these images of arousal and the languorous posture of the heroine indicate an open sexual invitation. Furthermore, the ornate and grandiose design of the interior matches Hunt’s pretensions; Strudwick’s ‘superficial decorativeness’ (the painting is inlaid with gold leaf) and the ‘cloying sweetness’ with which he treats the subject, indicate commercial rather than aesthetic incentives.50 Strudwick enjoyed considerable success as a follower of Burne-Jones, yet he lacks the ‘nervous intensity and intellectual vigour’ of fellow Pre-Raphaelites (Last Romantics, p. 92). The overall presentation of ‘Isabella’ lacks depth; and, by not interacting with the poetic source, the painting is rendered little more than a bejeweled beauty. An atmosphere of illicit decadence pervades other Keats-based paintings of this period; most notably, Daniel Maclise’s ‘Madeline After Prayer’ (1868) and Millais’s ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ (1863). Maclise was a respected commercial artist who specialised in sentimental, Madonna-like images of young women (frequently used to illustrate Heath’s Book of Beauty). Exhibited in the same year as Hunt’s ‘Isabella’, his scene from Keats’s ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ is described by Jan Marsh as ‘the most erotic image inspired by the poem’ (Pre-Raphaelite Women, p. 46, Plate 7). The work concentrates on the sexual enticement of Madeline’s disrobing; to emphasise her hips, the outer garments of her dress settle at the waist rather than her knees as in Keats’s poem. Maclise’s painting also invokes the line, ‘Of all the wreathèd pearls her hair she frees’: her long tresses fall ‘loose’, while a glimpse of cleavage and bare shoulder also suggest wantonness or, in the context of Keats’s poem, an imminent deflowering (‘The Eve of St Agnes’, 227). Her bed and the prominent position of the lute, with which Porphyro will later seduce the heroine, remind the viewer of the forthcoming sexual encounter. The varying degrees of titillation available to both the ‘insider’ audience, that is a reader of Keats’s poetry, and the uninitiated viewer does not, however, constitute our entire response to the painting. The ornate Catholicity rich colouration and Gothic carvings. The theme of religion is not only present in the ornate Catholicity of rich colouration and Gothic carvings, but through the unavoidable gaze of the figures in the stained glass that frame Madeline’s form. Thus, in taking pleasure from the woman before us, the viewer also encounters the puritan stare of the saints; in particular, our sexual




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Plate 7 Daniel Maclise, Madeline After Prayer. 1868. National Museums Liverpool (The Walker).

expectations crudely clash with the portrait of the Madonna and child. Furthermore, the religious icons remind the viewer that the heroine’s thoughts are preoccupied with heaven (Keats describes her as a ‘missioned spirit’, 193) until Porphyro’s intrusion changes the agenda to one of bodily communion. 51 The dynamics of the painting, with a sexualised foreground and secular background, admonishes the transgressive gaze invited by the presentation of Madeline. A number of images in Maclise’s painting generate this Keatsian tension between spiritual and earthly longings. Take, for example,



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the statue of St Agnes in the top left of the composition: a lamb nuzzles next to the maiden’s breast in a motherly scene which echoes the portrait of the Madonna and child whilst, at the same time, indicating sexual experience and raising the taboo subject of bestiality. This loaded image also directs the viewer back to Madeline’s chest, suggesting that she is on the threshold of sexual maturity. In addition the pair of objects on Madeline’s bedside table indicates a violation of innocence: a phallic candlestick towers above a book which, from the religious manuscript beneath the statue of St Agnes, we can presume is the Bible. Interacting with Keats’s most problematic and controversial subtexts results in a visualised scenario of sacredness defiled. Millais’s ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ also interprets the sexually explicit scene of Madeline undressing (Plate 8). G. H. Fleming regards ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ as a turning point in Millais’s career; as ‘Isabella and Lorenzo’ marked Millais’s move from conventional to radical artist, so his second Keats-based painting demonstrates this shift in

Plate 8 John Everett Millais, The Eve of St Agnes. 1863. The Royal Collection © 2006, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.




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reverse. The painting is less concerned with interpreting the poetic source than creating an atmospheric ‘nocturne’; its title and the inclusion of seven lines from Keats’s poem in the catalogue merely serve to ‘stimulate interest’ in the work.52 As Pearce comments, ‘This is, first, a picture of a half-dressed woman. It is also, if one reads the label, an illustration to Keats’s poem’ (Woman/Image/Text, p. 110). As the word ‘illustration’ suggests, this painting, like is Strudwick, can be allied with the superficial discourse of the ‘romantic tapestry school’. Fleming refers to the painting as Millais’s ‘gem of 1863’, suggesting its ornamental, and therefore commercial, appeal. Like Hunt’s, Strudwick’s and Maclise’s works, Millais’s ‘Eve’ is rendered exquisitely with ‘distinctly murky’ politics (Woman/Image/Text, p. 147). In the paintings of the other artists addressed in this section, however, the heroines dictate the composition and, to a greater or lesser extent, confront the viewer with their sexuality.53 Hunt’s, Strudwick’s and Millais’s heroines can be compared to Manet’s ‘Olympia’: the female focus is sexually alluring – her trade as a prostitute is indicated by the blatant invitation – yet the display of naked flesh does not render her an object (at least, she remains an ambiguous one). Olympia’s relaxed pose exudes confidence, and her gaze transfixes those who survey her in a reciprocal exchange which implicates the viewer; the audience’s active participation becomes that of a client in a brothel. Unlike Olympia, however, Millais’s Madeline does not regulate the marketing of her own body or set the terms of her exposure to the public. She neither occupies the dominant vertical position of Hunt’s ‘Isabella’ nor the suggestive horizontal line of Manet’s anti-heroine. Millais’s Madeline is subsumed by her surroundings and appears confined in the shadow of a barred window, unable to escape the penetrative gaze of an unidentified viewer. As Pearce, argues in relation to nineteenth-century narrative paintings, some female figures are rendered ‘prisoners’; their environment becomes a ‘hostile space’ of ‘alienation, oppression, and danger’ (Woman/Image/Text, p. 143).54 According to Pearce, Keats’s description of his heroine consists of ‘a sequence of defamiliarizing adjectives [. . .] As she undresses she is breast, and hands, and hair.’55 Consequently, Millais’s Madeline is ‘the mere sum of all her delectable parts’, the visual culmination of Keats’s metonymic dissociations (a strategy of subjugation that is subsequently applied to Keats in the elegiac tributes discussed in Chapter 1). Yet it would be inaccurate to suggest that Keats’s heroine



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is represented in the same manner as Millais’s. Keats’s female characters aspire to individuality, through religion (Madeline) and romance (Isabella), when located within despotic households. The reader experiences ‘Eve’ through the hopes and desires of both principle characters: as Porphyro journeys across the moors, Madeline is on her own spiritual quest; as Porphyro’s passions are aroused, Madeline takes pleasure in religious intoxication and emotional fervency; and as Porphyro seduces the vulnerable heroine, we are aware of her ‘painful’ reaction, subsequent ‘woe’ and fears for their escape (‘Eve’, 300, 314). Furthermore, if we see Keats’s heroine as existing within a ‘humanly deconstructive environment’ – with character subordinate to setting – then so does her male counterpart. Levinson suggests that both hero and heroine ‘illustrate’ the spectacular space they occupy: Porphyro is nothing more than an ‘operational device’ (Keats’s Life of Allegory, 99). Therefore, within Keats’s narrative poems, males can also signify ‘presence-as-absence’. Admittedly, Keats’s regard for his characters is not paramount, yet this is hardly comparable with the overtly sexualised subject in Millais’s ‘Eve’. The most significant consequence of Millais’s approach to Keats’s poem is how Porphyro’s absence from the canvas is transformed into a presence which directs our viewing experience: we are forced into the closet with Porphyro to partake of his scopophilia.56 In Millais’s ‘Eve’, the ‘objectification of the male gaze’ is unavoidable (Pearce, p. 105).57 In contrast to the pure vision of Madeline, the audience’s gaze becomes an accomplice in Porphyro’s transgression and a condoner of the heroine’s violation. Therefore, multiple insertors, each imposing their sexual fantasy onto a passive receptor, forcibly enter and occupy the sign. Rather than a single dubious encounter in Keats’s poem, Millais’s Madeline is effectively the victim of gang-rape. In viewing Millais’s painting, we participate in a depraved spectator sport, entering what Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock term the ‘masculinist parameters of pleasure, a phallocentric economy of desire’. As in pornography, Millais demonstrates a ‘possessive voyeurism’ which entails collusion between ‘spectator-buyer of these images and the picture of [the] woman’.58 However, the focus of pornography is usually on the culminatory climax whereas Millais’s painting provides an endless source of sexual stimulation, ‘a present tense of expectant erotic pleasure’ (Keats’s Life of Allegory, p. 146). Using Levinson’s ‘tension-to-discharge curve’, or economy of being, this




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painting represents a kind of ‘sex in the head’ – a literal form of ‘safe sex’ with no waste, only production. Like Hunt’s painting, which exchanges loss for gain, death for profitable art, both Millais’s and Maclise’s Keats-based paintings exchange endings for sustainable stimulation. Byron’s perceptive critique of Keats’s poetry as onanistic identifies the latter’s desire for a prolonged sensory experience in poetry. Similarly, Levinson argues that with Keats ‘we get no cumulative satisfaction. [. . .] Indeed, the voyeuristic emphasis of the eroticism effectively describes for us a rhetoric arrest at the level of forepleasure.’ In the instance of ‘Eve’, however, this ignores the literalness of Porphyro’s erection, the physical act which results in ‘Solution sweet’ (322), Madeline’s subsequent dejection at her lost innocence and the guilty withdrawal of the lovers (p. 122). Although Keats employs a number of devices to suspend conclusions, gradually raising the pleasure thermometer, he cannot avoid the ending. The written narrative must finish, yet a painting eternally exists within a single moment (however long it is observed or ‘read’ as a visual text, and regardless of our changing personal perceptions). A reader experiences progression with the narrative, but the viewer of art experiences progression outside the original stimulus. However, even though the ‘ended’ narrative operates within the premise of inevitable discharge, the issue of creative tension remains a predominant concern for Keats. In ‘Isabella’, for example, Lorenzo is ‘Fevered’ by the repression of his passion (56), which subsequently infects the heroine after his death. Isabella’s restlessness at Lorenzo’s absence develops into a convulsive sickness and then madness or frenzy – an abundance of energy with no outlet. Thus, the unnatural suppression of desire results in mental and physical disease for both the hero and the heroine. Their anxious hesitations cause a selfconsumption, or introspection, which incapacitates the pair. As the vital voluptuousness of Hunt’s Isabella is contained in a listless stasis, so the lovers’ agitated hearts become enmeshed in inertia. And, as if Keats’s verse had partaken of some ‘dull opiate’, the lovers are depicted as loitering and lingering, while a brooding melancholia and spiritless sighing suggest their inner languidity (‘Ode to a Nightingale’, 3). Tension is absent to the extent that even Lorenzo’s grave, or ‘yawning tomb’, appears to be contaminated by this festering, Grimm-like drowsiness (386). Incapacity results in bouts of agitation, depression and, in eventually death.



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Similarly, the sedentary heroines of Hunt’s, Millais’s, Strudwick’s and Maclise’s High Victorian paintings are caught in a degenerative torpor. In contrast with Hunt’s 1848 version of ‘Eve’, in which the lovers are pictured in the process of escape, and Millais’s ‘Isabella and Lorenzo’, in which the brother is captured mid-movement, the female figures in these later works are isolated and melancholic. Both Isabella and Madeline are rendered submissive recipients of the viewer’s active gaze and, as discussed in relation to the poem ‘Isabella’, within a Keatsian framework stasis can be damaging: Madeline is violated as a result of her passivity,59 Lorenzo is murdered due to the lovers’ unquestioning obedience, and Isabella, obtaining consolation from ‘unmoving sorrow’, literally withers away (‘Watching Narrator’, p. 297). Whilst both Keats’s poem and the post1860 paintings of ‘Isabella’ depict paralysis, the former sustains an ambiguous tension between anxiety and lethargy, whereas later Pre-Raphaelite paintings reproduce inert moments with fixed viewpoints. Many second-generation Pre-Raphaelites, including Maclise and Strudwick, painted sexualised scenes from Keats’s poems to cater for the market in literary art. Almost guaranteed a buyer, paintings with ostensibly Keatsian themes crowded the walls of High Victorian art exhibitions. As Charlotte Yeldham states, ‘Poetical tags accompanied portraits, landscapes and still-lives with no apparent purpose in many cases beyond mere poeticisation.’60 Such works, according to Yeldham, represent nothing more than ‘emotionless anecdotes from literature’ (Women Artists, I, p. 149). Furthermore, reproductions of Keats-based paintings in the popular press, along with pen-and-ink illustrations of his narrative poems, became so commonplace that one critic described ‘Isabella’ as ‘a design which every black and white artist is doomed to attempt sooner or later’.61 Indeed, Jessie Marion King and Eleanor Fortesque Brickdale were just a few of the names who illustrated ‘Isabella’, while artists such as Henrietta Rae produced full-scale oil paintings on this theme. Borrowing from Hunt’s image, Rae’s 1896 painting of ‘Isabella’ shows the heroine clasping a pot of thriving basil (exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1897, now untraced). Like Hunt, Rae was inspired by a trip to Italy, which accounts for the bright colours, full blooms and view of the dazzling blue sea. Arthur Fish describes this painting as ‘a most successful realization of the subject’ and praised its ‘surpassing




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beauty’.62 Responses to Fortesque Brickdale’s illustration of ‘Isabella’ were slightly more mixed. Although a reviewer for The Studio deemed the artist’s work to be ‘notable’ (when compared with other female illustrators), they could only ‘presume’ that the headpiece was related to Keats’s poem and condescendingly referred to Brickdale’s technique as ‘not quite mastered’ (Eleanor F. Brickdale, pp. 104, 108). Brickdale’s rendering evokes an oppressive atmosphere but unlike Hunt’s ‘Isabella’, where the enclosed surroundings emphasise the accessibility of, and potential for intimacy with, the heroine, so this version comments on social and psychological constraints. The unconventional choice of a landscape format compresses the heroine so she is literally hunched over the basil plant, yet opens out the rest of the room. A series of closed windows, with only one revealing a chink of the outside world, represent the limits of the heroine’s existence. As Marsh claims, Brickdale was a recognised painter and illustrator of literary texts, but ‘her use of gender imagery is sometimes unexpected and anti-romantic’.63 Marsh compares Brickdale with another illustrator, Jessie Marion King, whose renderings of literary texts were even more innovative. King’s singular approach to Keats’s poetry will be discussed at length in Chapter 4, but her 1907 illustrations to ‘Isabella’ are equally noteworthy.64 The customary debt to Hunt is evident in a full-length rendering of the heroine clasping her basil plant, while a billowing purple gown and abundance of hair denote broader Pre-Raphaelite influences. Notably, however, King was one of the few illustrators to engage with the disturbing scene of Lorenzo’s disinterment (Plate 9). Departing from the previous illustration of this scene by Robert Anning Bell (1897), which visualises the decapitation of the hero as a moment of female sexual triumph reminiscent of Aubrey Beardsley’s ‘The Climax’ (1893), King contrasts the phallic, vertical lines of the trees with the curves of Isabella’s feminine form as she delicately lowers her lover’s head into the pot.65 Rejecting a potential reading of blatant, if somewhat perverse, eroticism, King depicts a scene of emotional intimacy, an uncanny yet liberating moment of female sexual abandon. King is the most successful female artist in terms of capturing Keats’s ambivalence, yet she shares common traits with both Rae and Brickdale: all their heroines are physically demure, either bending over or crouching, and the pathos of the poem is emphasised. Rather than exploiting the vulnerable position of Isabella in Keats’s poem, female artists lament the heroine’s unfortunate plight, which, in turn, facilitates a critique of the restraints



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Plate 9 Jessie Marion King, Isabella. 1907. Reproduced by courtesy of Dumfries and Galloway Council and the National Trust for Scotland as copyright holders in the work of Jessie M. King. By permission of the British Library.

suffered by Victorian women and, more specifically, the obstacles faced by female artists. Despite these distinguishing characteristics, King, Rae and Brickdale remain indebted to the compelling iconography of a male




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artist’s rendering of the subject. Their illustrations, however inventive, were influenced by Hunt’s mainstream version, a painting that was so widely disseminated in the form of Blanchard’s engraving (published in 1869) that The Times declared it to be ‘a picture which has long since become the classic rendering in art of this last episode of Keats’s poem’.66 Other notable examples by female artists include a highly derivative illustration by Averil Burleigh and two fin-de-siècle Isabellas by Isobel L. Gloag (1895) and Ella M. Bedford (1898), both of which were exhibited in the Royal Academy. The latter pictures the heroine in silent reverie with a voluminous gown and hair draped around the basil plant. The former also focuses on the gown and captures the dark, claustrophobic atmosphere of Hunt’s rendering whilst exchanging the impassive expression of his Isabella for a crazed, and faintly ludicrous, expression as she jealously guards her pot.67 Hunt’s painting therefore becomes, as Christine Torney suggests, a ‘stock property’, the source from which all subsequent visual interpretations of ‘Isabella’ derive: Keats is effectively ‘written out’ of the creative exchange.68 Furthermore, such regurgitation is not limited to a single source. Hughes’s ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ (1855–6), for example, is an interesting painting, yet it by-passes Keats’s poem by using Hunt’s 1848 ‘Eve’ as a model: the third section of Hughes’s triptych is virtually identical to Hunt’s in terms of composition and colour.69 Half a century after Hughes was working from Hunt’s ‘Eve’, Waterhouse’s 1907 version of ‘Isabella’ displays a debt to the same artist (and, as Anthony Hobson suggests, to Arthur T. Newell’s ‘Isabella and the Pot of Basil’ which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1904). Waterhouse’s Isabella is not facing the viewer and does not stand but kneels before the pot, yet her encircling arms, denoting possession of the vigorous plant, mirror the posture of Hunt’s heroine (Plate 10). Some of the symbolic details are also direct borrowings; for example, the skull head which appears on Hunt’s majolica pot decorates the stone plinth on which Waterhouse’s urn stands and even the design of the watering can is noticeably similar. The position of the viewer as figurative trespasser forms another point of comparison. In Waterhouse’s version, the viewer does not enter by the steps in the background but is positioned on the opposite side of the vulnerably oblivious woman.



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Plate 10 John William Waterhouse, Isabella. 1907.

In addition, Waterhouse’s painting also resembles George Scharf’s illustration to ‘Isabella’ in the 1854 Moxon edition of Keats’s poems The Poetical Works of John Keats (London: Moxon, 1854), p. 209. However, the influence is not necessarily direct for example, Hunt’s large urn with its mass of basil and the healthy portrait of a heroine with black tresses first appears in Scharf’s version (the image of the fleeing brothers in the background of Strudwick’s painting can also be traced to these illustrations). As Keats’s poem is a reinterpretation of Boccaccio, who translated oral tales into a




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written form, so Hunt’s ‘Isabella’ is not an ‘original’, the prototype for all successive visual interpretations of the source. Hunt’s work represents a single, albeit highly influential, moment in the creative continuum. From this brief analysis, Waterhouse’s ‘Isabella’ comprises five key influences: Keats’s poem and Boccaccio’s tale, with which the artist would have been familiar (see his painting ‘A Tale from The Decameron’), and three images deriving from a fifty-year period in the nineteenth century. By tracing the verbal/visual heritage of ‘Isabella’, Waterhouse’s painting can almost be seen as a collaboration, a rearrangement of old and new interpretations. This co-dependency between visual interpretations excludes any interaction between media, most notably the artistic ‘readings’ of literary sources that precipitated this growth industry. Such a glut of commercially viable works suggests creative wealth: yet the internalisation of inspiration between artists over a short span of time indicates an unproductive, almost parasitic, trend. Ironically, Hunt’s aesthetic affinity with Keats, outlined earlier in the chapter, was initially based on a progressive continuation of the arts, an emergence of the present from the past, but the High Victorian Pre-Raphaelite practice results in regression, a present with no future that cannot improve upon, or even interact with, the past. Keats is continually consumed and reproduced, yet regeneration has become impossible. In Chapter 1, I detailed how a successful elegy invoked the corpus of the commemorative subject; if Keats is marginalised or excluded, the writer cannot surpass the Other and establish the Self. In the later paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates, Keats is often present by the title and verso alone – a sign severed from its signified in the visual text.70 All that issues forth from such bland predictability and concentric innerness is repetition; the potential for a productive interpretation is wasted. Waterhouse’s version represents one of the last narrative paintings of ‘Isabella’, an incestuous focus ultimately resulting in semantic exhaustion.71 Furthermore, in contrast to the early Pre-Raphaelite images of women, Hunt’s Isabella and Millais’s Madeline – along with their illegitimate offspring (that is not fathered by Keats) – represent compromised figures. The first interpretations of these narratives depicted the rebellion of women fleeing from patriarchal ownership into the arms of romantic love, a representation of Keats’s discourse that is rendered even more controversial by the Victorian



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preoccupation with gender spheres and feminine submission. Yet the same female characters in paintings of the 1860s reflect the male artist’s compulsive display of women in sexualised positions, an endorsement of patriarchy and a testament to the increasing polarisation of gender roles during this period. Certainly, post-1860 Isabellas and Madelines dominate the viewer’s attention, but the positioning of these heroines, presented in the foreground of a public exhibit whilst engaged in a private act, activates a fantasy scenario outside the object’s control. The female focus, like the posthumous, Keats is sign to everyone but herself. In Millais’s and Hunt’s respective interpretations of Keats’s poetry, it is evident that critique was replaced by conservatism, aesthetic productivity by material gain. The awkward tension and crude protestations of early Pre-Raphaelite art dissipated into conventional contentment; the allure of personal success produced a stylistic and sexual satiation most prominent amongst the followers of the movement.72 Ultimately, growth becomes synonymous with profit rather than the creative interaction between Keats and art, word and image.




Rossetti’s Influence on Keats’s Posthumous Reputation

I I loved thee ere I loved a woman, Love. (Rossetti, ‘To Art’) I have come to that pass of admiration for him [Keats] now, that I dare not read him, so discontented he makes me with my own work. (Ruskin, Modern Painters, V, 81) One figure remains conspicuous by his virtual absence from my discussion of Pre-Raphaelite art in the previous chapter: the Brotherhood’s charismatic leader and spokesman, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti has not been overlooked because he is irrelevant in the cultural heritage of Keats’s reputation: quite the opposite is in fact the case, as this chapter will show. George Milner claims that the Pre-Raphaelite painter was ‘something of a specialist’ on Keats who indulged his interest in the poet to the point of obsession.1 Rossetti mourned the absence of this ‘glorious fellow’ in a manner reminiscent of Wilde’s tributes: ‘Could Keats but have a day or two on earth / Once every year’.2 This chapter will examine the nature of Rossetti’s idée fixe and its effects on both the artist and the subject. Part I will discuss Rossetti’s attempts to formulate a criterion of canonicity to which Keats’s life and work must not only conform, but represent an ideal. This literary discourse, rooted in selfinvestment, is not, however, developed by Rossetti in isolation. This chapter explores the artist’s inner-circle and examines how the posthumous Keats functions in visual and verbal exchanges 78



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between men. Issues of effeminacy and homoeroticism, raised in relation to Wilde’s elegies in Chapter 1, will be re-examined. Part I, therefore, discusses the ways in which Rossetti interacts with Keats as both an individual and the member of a homosocial group. Part II will reassess the assumed primacy of the present by reclaiming the significance of the past. Rossetti’s contrived portrait of Keats benefits the living artist and his circle at the expense of the subject; however, the former cannot diminish the integrity of the work he praises and aspires to emulate. As will become apparent, Keats’s poetry is not easily defined and categorised. In the previous chapter, Hunt’s autobiography, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, was central to my discussion of the history of this movement and its members. Relying on Hunt’s record, I outlined a sequence of events that began with the painter’s formative knowledge of Keats’s poems and resulted in Rossetti’s attraction to a painting inspired by his verse. However, Julie Codell suggests that Rossetti was in fact ‘the originator of the idea of using Keats as a subject’.3 Hunt audaciously proclaimed that his ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ was the first visual rendering of Keats’s poetry when he was aware that Rossetti had previously produced a sketch of ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ for the Cyclographic Society (of which both Hunt and Millais were members).4 Refuting Hunt’s prior claim to Keats, Arthur Benson claims that it was Rossetti who ‘discovered’ Keats at the age of eighteen, two years before the first meeting of the PRB and the publication of Monckton Milnes’s biography: ‘At this time [1846] Rossetti’s intellectual ardour was very great. He read Shelley and Keats with profound admiration.’5 After this early encounter, Keats remained a regular item on the aesthetic agenda of the painter. William Michael Rossetti contemplated his sibling’s interest in this poet towards the end of his life: ‘Perhaps, in his last few years, the poetry of Keats was more constantly present to my brother’s thoughts than that of anyone else, hardly excepting Dante.’6 Substantiating this opinion, Dante Gabriel’s correspondence with Harold Buxton Forman, editor of The Poetical and Other Writings of John Keats, displayed such an intimate knowledge of Keats’s poetry that it was published privately in a slim volume shortly after the First World War.7 If we accept, then, that Keats was a predominant concern for Rossetti, proving even more influential to this artist than to his




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Pre-Raphaelite brothers, why has he remained peripheral to my discussion thus far? The answer to this question is twofold: first, and of most practical importance, both Hunt and Millais produced numerous Keats-based paintings while Rossetti produced only four early sketches and a half-finished oil work. This curious lack of tangible visual material raises the second consideration in the omission of Rossetti from Chapter 2. Unlike Hunt and Millais, whose work can be seen as indicative of the course of Pre-Raphaelitism, Rossetti obstinately evades such conformity. Rarely exhibiting during his lifetime and dealing only with a close-knit circle of acquaintances and patrons from the mid-1850s, Rossetti developed an inimitable style of his own. Jan Marsh comments on his complex character, Simultaneously escapist and competitive in temperament, he retreated into the past while also leading the avant garde, shunned exhibition, while ardently seeking fame, and swung from extreme confidence to despairing self-disgust. (Painter and Poet, p. xi) His originality and idiosyncrasies are nowhere more evident than in his relationship with Keats. While the particular nature of Rossetti’s relationship with Keats provides the focus of this chapter, the Pre-Raphaelite’s also serves as a revealing representative of the ‘cultured’ eccentricities of High Victorianism. As George H. Ford comments, The paradoxical thing about Rossetti is that although he remained aloof from many things Victorian, he represents a recognizable trend, a trend in which he played a considerable role. [. . .] Rossetti brings us to a general consideration of the literary standards of the different periods of the Victorian era. (Keats and the Victorians, p. 94) Jerome McGann echoes this opinion: ‘Rossetti must be come to terms with because Rossetti – as much for Ford as for Ruskin and Pater – is an epitome of the last fifty years of the nineteenth century’ (Game that Must be Lost, p. 143). A discussion of Rossetti in context, situated within his habitual coterie of artistic friends, illuminates the circle that was responsible for the consolidation of Keats’s reputation (and left a legacy on Keats studies that lasted well into the twentieth



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century). To detail the internal politics and preoccupations of this cultural network is to account for the representation of Keats during the High Victorian period. The chapter of Rossetti’s career that I am most concerned with here is the ‘last phase’ from 1876 to 1882, when drug dependency and ‘persecution mania’ were gradually undermining both his mental and physical health.8 From William Gaunt’s record of reclusiveness and melancholia to Alicia Craig Faxon’s more recent portrait of the artist’s ill-fated life, Rossetti’s final years have been viewed, almost without exception, as relatively insignificant in terms of creative output.9 Marsh takes exception to the ‘often-voiced view that both his pictorial and poetic powers failed with his illness’: yet despite emphasising the periods of ‘Recovery’ and ‘Respite’ in the final years of Rossetti’s life, she too charts the predictable path of ‘Decline’ (Painter and Poet, p. 460).10 Steadily, in the years after leaving Kelmscott, Rossetti’s sphere contracted, mentally and physically. Alienated or sorrowful, family and friends felt unable to assist. The everyday dynamism of his life virtually vanished under a welter of anxieties and depressions. (p. 488) Rossetti is invariably regarded with a mixture of sympathy and scorn for reducing himself to a mere shadow of his former existence, ‘spent on the fringe of a wild Bohemia’.11 Admittedly, his residence no longer housed a menagerie of exotic animals or reverberated with the heated debates of such luminaries as Morris, Ruskin, Swinburne and Whistler, yet Rossetti merely exchanged this crowd for another and increasingly relied upon the company of his devoted siblings (significantly, William Michael Rossetti disputed the notion that the last years of his brother’s life were spent in constant decline). Roger C. Lewis refers to the ‘admirer-collaborators’ who surrounded Rossetti all his life: the final group was ‘smaller than in 1868–1871 but no less fervent’.12 With men like Ford Madox Brown, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Frederick Shields in constant contact with the artist, it is difficult to believe that Rossetti suffered much mental stagnation; in fact, some of the most detailed explications of his aesthetic principles were written to correspondents at this time.




Consuming Keats

Throughout his life, Rossetti positioned himself at the centre of his own select network of satellites. Although no named group or movement existed under Rossetti’s leadership between the late 1870s and the early 1880s, the painter ‘contemplated the chance of making a new genius, a new set of geniuses, of compelling with his personal wizardry a third Pre-Raphaelite flowering’.13 There was certainly no shortage of male companionship for Rossetti at this time. According to Gaunt, ‘New men were seen about him in these later years’, and Vivien Allen states that by 1879 Gabriel had attracted a succession of younger men whom he took up enthusiastically, championing them as God’s gift to poetry or art and often raising the eyebrows of his contemporaries.14 One such youthful aspirant appeared on the fringe of this latest ‘brotherhood’ during 1879. Thomas Hall Caine, later to become a best-selling author of Victorian romances, was twenty-five when he wrote to the artist for the first time, enclosing a lecture he had given in Liverpool on the spiritual purity of Rossetti’s verse (this quality is also praised in Keats’s verse, as will be discussed shortly).15 Rossetti replied by confirming, ‘Your estimate of the impulses influencing my poetry is such as I should wish it to suggest’, thereby beginning an intense correspondence that ceased only when Caine moved in with Rossetti during the summer of 1881 (Plate 11).16 Caine recalls that throughout their correspondence, ‘there was not [. . .] a single day in which I did not either receive a letter from Rossetti or write to him’, and describes how these letters ‘were sometimes very long, being of six, eight, twelve, and even sixteen pages’ (Recollections, p. 27). The correspondence, which continued unabated for two years, certainly proved copious with approximately one hundred and fifty letters housed in the Manx National Heritage Library alone. Caine remembered Rossetti saying, ‘They were among the largest body of literary letters I ever wrote’, and praises the condescension of this accomplished artist in establishing such a close relationship with an unknown writer.17 Allen summarises: ‘Caine hero-worshipped Rossetti from the start, while the older man gradually came to feel real trust and affection for his young admirer’ (Dear Mr. Rossetti, p. 7). One of the first letters that Caine received from Rossetti checks his credentials for discipleship: ‘I am truly delighted to hear how young



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Plate 11 Thomas Hall Caine. Manx National Heritage.

you are: I suppose you are not married’ (29 December 1879). Ascertaining Caine’s age and bachelordom reflects a late Victorian trend outlined by Paul Hammond: ‘much of the literature of homosexual desire in the nineteenth century focused on boys rather than adults. Volumes of verse romanticised the bloom of youth’.18 One of the younger members of Rossetti’s final circle, George Allen, was known as ‘that marvellous boy’, recalling the figure of Ganymede discussed in Chapter 1; within this context, Allen acts as a passive receptor to the older artist’s insertor. The painter was now in his fifties, yet the average age of his devotees never altered: many, like Marston and William Sharp, were in their early twenties, while Oliver Madox




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Brown, son of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, was in his early teens when he entered Rossetti’s circle.19 Similarly, Caine ‘represented himself as an innocent provincial lad, overawed by his illustrious new acquaintance’ (Painter and Poet, p. 523). Homoeroticism between Victorian males, like Rossetti and his followers, was based on an established tradition that dated back to Ancient Greece and centred on the education of adolescent youths by older men. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick states, ‘this was a bond of mentorship; the boys were apprentices in the ways and virtues of Athenian citizenship, whose privileges they inherited’.20 The arrangement was advantageous for the older man, eager to impart his life’s learning, which would, in turn, act as a rite-of-passage for the boy maturing into adulthood. Accordingly, Rossetti harboured paternalistic feelings for his young brood, and Caine’s ‘under-educated enthusiasm’ afforded many opportunities for instruction (Painter and Poet, p. 512). As the correspondence continued and Rossetti adopted Caine as a member of his inner sanctum, both men became less guarded in their impassioned feelings for fellow male poets. Caine describes the ‘throb of delight’ he experiences when reading Keats’s poetry (22 January 1880), and outlines the ‘irresistible attractions’ of Oliver Madox Brown that ‘have been arousing a sweet sympathetic sense’ (16 July 1880). Caine’s sonnet ‘To O[liver]M[adox]B[rown]’, lingers over ‘Thy sinuous loins engirt’, and mourns the subjects’ unfulfilled, ‘broad-thewed promise’ (‘thews’ being a synonym for muscles: Appendix 9, 6–7).21 Madox Brown is a favourite topic for both correspondents, with Rossetti referring to him as an ‘embryo Classic’. He is regarded as a select specimen, bred out of homosocial bohemia: ‘Oliver was the product of the teeming hot-beds of art and literature’ (2 June 1880). Such suggestive intimates are not limited to one member of the group; as Marsh states, ‘Mr Rossetti was a queer cove’ who drew homoerotic pleasure from a selection of special literary sons (Painter and Poet, p. 482). For example, Rossetti expresses his admiration for Charles Whitehead, writer of the highly acclaimed Richard Savage, with the ambivalent term ‘desideratum’ (meaning ‘something for which a desire or longing is felt; something wanting and required or desired’, OED). Benson believes that Rossetti revealed himself to Caine ‘on terms of unguarded and brotherly intimacy’, a sentiment supported by the press advertisement for the second edition of Caine’s biography:



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‘This book is beautifully written and is as fascinating to read as almost any novel; it proves that the friendship and affection between two men can be as tender and strong as the love between a man and a woman.’22 As Allen comments, That phrase about friendship and affection between two men is more revealing than he probably intended but it reflects accurately the strong homoerotic strain in late nineteenth-century England, the days of his youth, particularly in London. (Portrait of a Victorian Romancer, p. 410) The biography itself contains many examples of Caine’s adoration: ‘our intimacy deepened by correspondence’, ‘he [Rossetti] was absolutely irresistible to me’ and, again, ‘Rossetti was absolutely irresistible’ (pp. 18, 105, 158). So overt was the homoerotic discourse of the second edition that a critic for the Westminster Review commented on Caine’s ‘spirit of affectionate respect for the poet’, while another, writing for the Morning Post, felt the need to re-establish its status as ‘A quiet, manly and dignified book’ (my emphasis).23 Caine was not, however, always so forthcoming on the subject of his feelings for the artist. In a letter dated 22 September 1880, Caine questions the propriety of avowing more than intellectual affinity for his mentor and expresses anxiety about the reception of his verbose, ‘effeminate’ prose. Vivien Allen’s biography of Caine does, in fact, expose the novelist’s youthful bisexuality. When faced with marriage to the thirteen-yearold Mary Chandler, his ‘ambiguous sexuality’ surfaced. The initial section of his correspondence with Rossetti is infused with homoerotic undertones – Caine confesses in his first letter that he ‘loves’ the artist – which subside into a homosocial bond after his first visit to Cheyne Walk (24 July 1879). Yet although Rossetti’s heterosexuality became increasingly apparent to Caine, their exchanges conform to models of homosociality.24 Hammond identifies a number of Victorian discourses that offered ‘opportunities for homoerotic expression: comradeship, religious devotion, aesthetic pleasure, and the recurrent lure of Ancient Greece’, and Rossetti and Caine’s mutual admiration for one poet in particular admitted a sustained discussion of all these subjects (Love Between Men, p. 127). I have already touched upon the first and the last of these homoerotic




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discourses; and, in relation to Keats, a Grecian mentor and pupil relationship is facilitated by virtue of the Romantic poet’s early death. As will become apparent, the artist perceives Keats as one of his retinue of young men to be saved and celebrated. There is also a discernible kinship between Rossetti and Keats in their enthusiasm for Ancient Greece as a source of poetic inspiration, but my emphasis here will be on the aesthetic and religious discourses that emerge during the course of the Caine correspondence. Rossetti and Caine’s mutual rapture over Keats’s ‘truly beautiful’ verse dominates their correspondence (16 February 1880). Practically every letter dwells upon some aspect of the Romantic poet’s ‘flawless gift’ (11 June 1880). One of Caine’s first letters to Rossetti outlines a proposed ‘study of the genius of Keats’; and even after the relevant chapter in Cobwebs of Criticism is complete, he ‘cannot let it drop’ (28 October 1879). Such sustained interest in a writer is rare for both Caine and Rossetti; the former comments on the ‘freak of feverish fancy’ that usually determines his selection of literary greats (2 August 1879), while William Michael Rossetti suggests that his brother’s adoption of poets as an object of temporary adoration was ‘not merely excessive, but a trifle fanciful’ (Doughty and Wahl, p. 1707, n. 2). Even established poets like Coleridge were subject to an initial fervour that cooled over time. By contrast, Keats was singled out as the father of the PRB, a status he retained during the Aesthetic movement. Caine praises Keats’s poetry for ‘the beautifying influence of its mere existence’ (20 March 1880), an art for art’s sake sentiment taken to its extreme by William Morris when he fashioned the icon of absolute beauty into an objét d’ârt: Keats’s appearance in the Kelmscott Press [. . .] shows how generally admired his poetry had become by the end of the century. The books were not always suitable for reading; the intention was that they should be artefacts in themselves. The beauty of Keats’s work was now thought suitable material for fine printing.25 Keats had become a precious and rarefied commodity whose poetry was deemed to be the product of a delicate constitution. The marginalia in Rossetti’s 1868 Moxon edition of Keats’s poetry reveals his regard for Endymion: ‘a magic toy, fit for the childhood of a divine poet’, a sentiment repeated to Jane Morris twelve years later.26



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Caine pictures ‘Keats’s morbid sensitiveness, racked by a word or a look’, whilst endorsing the myth, originated by Keats’s contemporaries, that he was ‘snuffed out by an article’ (Don Juan, XI, line 60): ‘labour spurned did more than all else to kill Keats in 1821’ (5 April 1880). Rossetti endorses this view of Keats as a victim of cruel, misguided criticism (thereby feeding artists’ persecution complex and adding an element of heroism to his own struggles). As Rossetti cocooned himself from what he perceived to be ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’, so he attempts to shield Keats from the moral pollutants of society.27 In Rossetti’s sonnet ‘John Keats’ (composed 1880), the subject’s imagination is regarded as a sanctuary, entirely separate from the infectiousness of sordid reality.28 Caine and Rossetti are unified in their desire to sever the Romantic poet from his social context: ‘Keats’s surgery was not a leading fact in his life’ (1 April 1880). This purging of a loathsome, commonplace existence is considered, by both correspondents, to be a ‘special privilege’ reserved for poets, like Keats, who meet an early death, thus making possible ‘the lovely sentimentalized image he bequeathed to us of the Young Poet’ (28 March 1880). By this point in Keats’s afterlife, the poet was regarded as a valuable curiosity, a ‘sugar coated tonic-pill’ (Ford, p. 114). In René Girard’s theory of the erotic triangle, such a coveted commodity is referred to as the ‘beloved’.29 Within Girard’s schema, the beloved represents the object of desire – combining both the sexual and the textual – and thereby acts as a catalyst for the Oedipal clashes and male bonding that structure his reading of European literature. However, like most posthumous representations of Keats, the beloved is essentially inert, adopting the role of sign usually occupied by the female subject in Rossetti’s work.30 As E. Warwick Slinn states, the ‘silent object [. . .] is hardly allowed the dignity of reciprocal response’, enabling the two active participants of Girard’s triangle to define the object.31 For the impulsive questor of the triangle, claiming possession of the beloved represents a Holy Grail of accomplishment, while the mediator acts as an antagonist to this upstart, retarding his progress and proximity to the goal. This relationship may, however, create a false impression of the mediator defending the beloved against an impetuous youth eager to devour its secret knowledge when, in practice, he assumes ascendancy over the beloved by virtue of his wisdom and experience. The mediator




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stifles the potential of the beloved, curtailing independent signification, just as Rossetti cossets Keats in a circumscribed sphere of sentimentalised poetic existence. Therefore, the beloved is controlled by its mediator and hunted by the questor, preyed upon by the impassioned violence emanating from one corner of the triangle and the calculating regulation of the other. The beloved is a victim with two masters, as is apparent in the letters of Rossetti and Caine. In a letter dated 16 February 1880, Rossetti actually refers to Keats as his ‘lovely and beloved’, while also acknowledging his own propensity to caution and control: ‘I’m forever on the Mentor tack’ (1 April 1880). In his biography, Caine recalls how Rossetti ‘did not shrink from playing the part of mentor, censuring, particularly, a tendency to involution in style’ (Recollections, p. 109). Allen presents Caine as an ardent youth who ‘worked his way greedily round the library shelves [with] no pause for critical consideration’, until Rossetti regulated his reading habits (Portrait of a Victorian Romancer, p. 23). Rossetti also critiqued Caine’s juvenile writings, condemning his sonnet to Oliver Madox Brown as ‘lame’ and ‘illegible’ (27 January 1881). The recipient does not appear to have been offended by such remarks and merely ignores the artist’s goodnatured jibes at the purple passages in his poems: ‘The Keats sonnets seem to have taken a mauve bath at some time. [. . .] Can you explain?’ (12 May 1880).32 Significantly, Rossetti tutored Caine through a number of manuscripts on the subject of Keats (including proposed lectures articles). Thus, the mediator demonstrates his knowledge of the beloved and the questor commences his learning experience. In other words, Keats defines the relationship between two other men. Caine gained very real benefits from befriending Rossetti: advice on his wayward writing style and connections amongst the London literary elite. William Fredeman refers to Rossetti’s ‘terminal involvement with Hall Caine’ through which the latter used the former to ‘launch both his own career and the Rossetti legend’.33 In return, however, Rossetti felt imperious before Caine’s servility. Caine hails Rossetti as the leading sonneteer of the age, to which the latter responds by stating that such praise ‘greets me with a gratifying ray of generous recognition’.34 As Allen states, ‘Caine was pushy and ambitious’ while Rossetti was ‘susceptible to flattery’ (Dear Mr. Rossetti, p. 10). Recalling Hammond’s list of homosocial discourses in the Victorian



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period, Rossetti and Caine’s relationship represents a truly Athenian partnership that proved beneficial for both parties. Thus far I have situated Keats, Caine and Rossetti within the appropriate corner of the Girardian triangle. However, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick critiques what she perceives to be an easy correlation between human relations and an inflexible structure. Girard’s symmetry – his ‘calculus of power’ – is, according to Sedgwick, a distorting and facile simplification. Sedgwick transposes a second, asymmetrical triangle onto Girard’s base model, modifying the initial configuration with the issues of gender, language and class relations. Rossetti was twenty-five years older than Caine, but age does not constitute the only factor contributing to the artist’s seniority. Caine quickly learnt to submit to his housemate’s masterfulness, describing the middle-aged man as ‘certainly domineering, moving in a group of friends who yielded to him or got out of his way’ (Recollections, p. 176).35 Rossetti’s desire for dominion over his company was perhaps fuelled by his professional achievements.36 Regardless of Rossetti’s reputation for being difficult – at once temperamental, in neglecting commissions, and dogmatic, in refusing to exhibit his paintings – a select group of patrons kept demand consistently higher than what the artist could supply.37 Russell Ash comments on the economic success of his later life: ‘by 1867 Rossetti was earning £3000 a year, a substantial amount by the standards of the day’.38 Even though his outgoings always exceeded his income, Rossetti was ‘well off’ in relation to Caine. Prior to his move to London, Caine was a ‘clerk in the lower middle-class of provincial life’, a builder’s draughtsman churning out predated obituaries in the evenings for a local Liverpool newspaper (Recollections, p. 26). Rossetti may have identified with Caine’s straitened circumstances, coming from a ‘cultured yet impoverished family’ of Italian immigrants, but by the 1880s, he represented the consummate artist who, in the eyes of his young correspondent, deserved adulation (Painter and Poet, p. xi). To Caine, Rossetti represented ‘one of the gods of the earth’, exclaiming in his biography that ‘not Keats himself ever felt more humble in the memory of great men’, (thereby elevating his own self-depreciation by association with the beloved, Recollections, pp. 76, 143). Although his social status remained ambiguous, Rossetti assumes the head of our triumvirate through the sheer artistic cachet of his




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reputation. In addition, an analysis of economic and social factors reconfirm the relative positions of the questor and the mediator. For both Rossetti and Caine, a recognition of Keats’s poetic worth could be financially profitable. Towards the end of his career, Rossetti associated artistic endeavours with monetary gain; in the May of 1876, the painter anticipates that his late tribute to Keats, ‘Mnemosyne’, will ‘bring grist to the mill’, and attempts to sell the unfinished work to C. E. Fry for £500 (Plate 12).39 Throughout his correspondence with Caine, Keats is upheld as a shrine to art who is free from the ‘modern habit [of] treating material as product’ (29 December 1879). Yet, just one month after this statement, Rossetti refers to ‘an undoubted unprinted sonnet by Keats’ and immediately raises the issue of its value: ‘You shd. certainly use that, whether good or bad. He [Keats] stands too high to be harmed by a mere juvenile trifle – and it would help sales immensely’ (27 January 1880). In the spring of 1880, Caine informs Rossetti of a number of discoveries he was made while working on a proposed biography of Keats: ‘I appear to have stumbled across a good deal of fresh material out of which capital might be made if required’ (5 April 1880). Caine also proposes to give a lecture on Keats in aid of the poet’s impoverished sister, but Rossetti raises a series of economically related objections: he is anxious to prevent Caine from ‘impoverishing your materials for an article’, whilst still ‘raising as much from it [the lecture] as possible’ (12 March 1880). Rossetti’s solution is for Caine to receive ‘a slight compensation’ for his efforts.40 Thus, a gallant gesture towards a ‘damsel in distress’ – Keats’s sister – is evaluated in terms of financial viability. Rossetti and Caine repeatedly express their appreciation of Keats’s apparent unworldliness, yet both correspondents commodify the poet for personal gain. The prevailing economic discourse within this correspondence highlights the self-interest of both writers. By transposing LéviStrauss’s anthropological analysis of marriage onto the relationship between Rossetti and Caine, their partnership, however unequal, corresponds to the coalition formed between the heads of two households.41 Within this trading process, whereby women are valued as a type of currency, the bride becomes a bartering tool. Similarly, the beloved, that is Keats, is at times reduced to a medium of mercantile traffic within the letters, simultaneously commercialised and effeminised. Sedgwick’s proposed power dynamic is firmly fixed upon the erotic



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Plate 12 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Mnemosyne. 1881. Delaware Art Museum, Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial Collection.


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rivalry between two men with one corner of the triangle, however acute, remaining essentially female: the woman acts as a conduit for ‘cementing relationships with other men’ (Sedgwick, p. 123). Her model is, therefore, based on the presupposition of heterosexuality. However, in this instance, sexual difference is by-passed; Keats becomes part of a homoerotic exchange that extends to all three members of the triangle. The ‘dead, discredited, or disempowered body of a woman’ is replaced by the fifty-five-year-old corpse of Keats, yet he remains equally disenfranchised in this ‘transaction of honour between men’ (Sedgwick, p. 137). As economics and gender become inextricably linked in this correspondence, so Keats’s death from tuberculosis proves to be an integral aspect of the poet’s appeal. For Caine, artistic genius harbours a ‘congenital tendency to Keats’s awful disease’; rather than he contracting an illness, he is the possessor of a perverse gift that singles him out for poetic immortality. As Shelley light-heartedly wrote to his fellow Romantic poet: ‘this consumption is a disease particularly fond of people who write such good verses as you have done’.42 Rossetti enviously dwells on this privileged status, identifying his doom-laden life with the ‘tortured’ souls of the Romantic poets. Befitting Rossetti’s self-image, Caine attributes Keatsian characteristics to his mentor’s final moments: and then in a simple, natural way, but with a certain quiet exaltation reminding me of Keats’s calm confidence, he spoke of holding his place among the English poets after his death. (Recollections, p. 247) Caine adapts Rossetti’s persona to a romanticised ideal of the poet, thus preparing him for entry into the canon.43 Such a self-invalued interest in Keats also dictates Rossetti’s appraisal of the forefather’s work. Rossetti ranked Keats’s poems with a system of asterisks in his Moxon edition, selecting a choice minority for particular praise: ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ are marked for special consideration, but none surpass ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and ‘The Eve of St Mark’.44 In a letter dated 29 December 1879, Rossetti states that ‘my favourite piece in his [Keats’s] works is La Belle Dame sans Merci’, as it focuses on a trend for ‘choicer’ and ‘simpler’ poetics, while the ‘lovely Eve of St Mark – a fragment which



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seems to me to rank with La Belle Dame sans Merci’ is also seen as ‘a clear advance in direct simplicity’ (12 March 1880). Rossetti is evidently commenting on the rich yet concise form of these poems, but the term ‘simplicity’ is hardly synonymous with of the predecessor’s highly wrought style. For Rossetti, Keats’s verse ‘teem[s] with beauty’, yet his commentaries appear to distinguish and value terseness (June 1880). The question must then be asked: why does Rossetti profess a delight in Keats’s supposed artlessness in marked contrast to his own aesthetic principles? And, more significantly, why would Rossetti contrive a fictitious empathy? The answer perhaps lies in a cursory comment on ‘The Blessed Damozel’ by Evelyn Waugh: ‘It is interesting to see him [Rossetti] at this late hour attempting to recapture the simplicity and sweetness of his earliest poem.’45 From this perspective, Rossetti is returning to the unpretentious sincerity of early paintings such as ‘The Girlhood of Mary Virgin’, ‘Ecce Ancilla Domini’ and poems like ‘Sudden Light’ and ‘The Woodspurge’, which were not produced to meet the expectations of patrons or alleviate debt. It is partly for this reason that the artist coveted Keats’s eternal youth and Caine’s greenness, impressing upon the latter the value of ‘simple English in prose writing and in narrative poetry’ (12 March 1880). ‘English pure and simple’ is a recurrent theme in Rossetti’s letters to Caine, and he praises the ‘characteristically English’ verse of Hyperion in particular to compensate for insecurities regarding his own nationality (Milner, p. 215). Rossetti’s insistence on simplicity and Englishness was, in part, a response to Robert Buchanan’s infamous article, ‘The Fleshly School of Painting’, in which the poet’s ‘foreignness’ is equated with his sensuous, ‘immoral’ art.46 Naturally, Rossetti was affronted by this flagrant misunderstanding of his work and sought to refute accusations that undermined his artistic integrity. He waged a crusade, largely with himself and those closest to him, in which many proxies were employed: Milton’s sonnets, for example, become ‘fresh and wholesome’ in the same letter as ‘La Belle Dame’ is deemed to be ‘chaster’ than anything previously written by Keats (28 March 1880). However, such a disingenuous discourse is at odds with his attempts to visualise Keats’s verse. Rossetti’s final drawing of ‘La Belle Dame’ focuses on the ‘sweet moan’ of sexual consummation (20, Plate 13). The lovers generate erotic tension through a erotic of a clasped hand being kissed, as their lower bodies are forced together between the




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Plate 13 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, La Belle Dame sans Merci. c.1855. The British Museum.

saddle and the horse’s head. In addition, Rossetti’s later rendition of Keats’s Mnemosyne represents a tribute to Jane Morris with her ubiquitous curls, abundant flesh, wide eyes and full, red mouth (see Plate 12). On the rare occasions when Rossetti interpreted Keats visually, the Romantic poet’s work was easily adapted to the artist’s sensualist style. Similarly, in his chapter on Keats in Cobwebs of Criticism, Caine concedes ‘it may be true that Keats’s mind with its loving yearning after loveliness seemed always to have a look southward’: in other words, the Romantic poet’s concern with beauty was in no small part synonymous with sexual desire.47 The author also celebrates Keats’s ‘youth [which] ran riot with a like wantonness’ to his own, highlighting the irony, and blatant hypocrisy, of attempting to ‘chasten’ Keats within a discourse centred on homoerotic identification. Such a contrived discourse, praising the virtuous whilst lingering on the corporeal, ultimately derives from narcissism.48 For example, at the same time as Rossetti omits a ballad from his 1881 volumes of poetry because ‘it deals trivially with a base amour’ (25 February 1880), he asks Buxton Forman to refrain from publishing Keats’s



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poem, ‘Sharing Eve’s Apple’, because its ignoble expression of sexual passion is ‘rather vulgar [. . .] and gives no idea of his true nature’.49 Rossetti’s estimate of his own writing, which, as we have seen, is partly a reaction to the critical response of his work, now directs his appreciation of Keats. A further instance of this self-fashioning by proxy is evident in the artist’s promotion of the ‘frisson of fascinated distaste’ that swept through Victorian readers upon the publication of the Fanny Brawne love-letters (Marquess, p. 61 original emphasis). Rossetti claims to have felt ‘greatly pained by the perusal of the Keats-Brawne letters’, yet remains ‘greatly interested’ (9 May 1880). Even though Rossetti is saddened as ‘they add nothing to one’s idea of his [Keats’s] epistolary powers’, the letters should still be ‘obtainable as a literary treasure’, presumably to admit his own private access while preserving the reputation of Keats (1 April 1880; 9 May 1880). This sanitised image of Keats, consisting of nothing but what is sacred and pure, mirrors Rossetti’s revised view of his own work: ‘I deal with nothing but what is healthy’ (25 October 1880). Rossetti is projecting onto the life and works of the precursor a self-reflexive discourse of artistic wish-fulfilment in an attempt to make amends for his own past indulgences. Rossetti became fond of quoting the following line from a Hartley Coleridge sonnet: ‘If I have sinned in act, I may repent’ (11 April 1880 and 29 March 1881). As planned Rossetti’s posthumous reputation benefited from such a self-conscious manipulation of the artistic persona. Walter Pater, a connoisseur of the homoerotic discourse, wrote a résumé of Rossetti’s work shortly after his death. In the fourth edition of Ward’s The English Poets, Pater lovingly dwells on the ‘perfect sincerity’, ‘wholesome wisdom’ and ‘pure reflection’ of Rossetti’s poetry.50 Caine also assured his readers that Rossetti ‘had been prompted by the highest of spiritual emotions, [. . .] the passions of the body were as nothing unless sanctified by the concurrence of the soul’ (Recollections, p. 11). This image of Rossetti’s stainless propriety left a lasting legacy on twentieth-century critics eager to defend his honour. Writing in 1955, Desmond MacCarthy states: ‘he was not the most sensual but, on the contrary, the most spiritual of love-poets’.51 Faxon’s more recent study of the artist similarly expresses consternation at the sensualist label applied to Rossetti: ‘He was intensely secular and profoundly spiritual, in many ways a mystic of the imagination, and yet he became the leader of what was dubbed the “Fleshly School” of poetry and painting.’52




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If Rossetti’s narcissism had such a profound effect on his own posthumous reputation, what are the consequences for the beloved? In the correspondence between Rossetti and Caine, the literary subject undergoes a ritualistic purification in accordance with a revised ideal of the writing Self. Like a religious icon, Keats’s desexualisation is both empowering and disempowering; he is a shrine of untainted holiness, confirming his special status, yet he is also excluded from the realm of human fears and desires (once again becoming the insensate soul of ‘Adonais’). The beloved attains the status of deity or ‘King’ and his work becomes a Gospel, read with utter conviction, but, as a passive receptor, Keats is not endowed with the omnipotence of a god.53 Keats stimulates same-sex pleasures when, as the subject, he is symbolically castrated, and his verse admits an egoistic literary agenda that re-inscribes his own corpus. However, Girard cautions the active agent who has fashioned the beloved into an object of worship; the former is now subject to ‘The whole gamut of feelings [. . .] of a religious experience in which terror, anathema, and taboos play an increasing role’ (Girard, p. 77). The accomplished artist can become prey to a paralyzing religious fear, and Pater discerns worrying signs of ‘divine mania’, ‘insanity’ and ‘a certain feverishness of soul’ in Rossetti’s poetry. As Benson detects in his discussions of Rossetti’s verse, ‘the wind blows cold out of the inner shrine of fear’ (p. 90).

II So far this chapter has concentrated on the present’s primacy over the past, a reversal of the Bloomian hierarchy in which the inheritor now exerts influence over the predecessor. I have examined the numerous objectifications of Keats by Caine and Rossetti, tracing the imposition of divergent, and often contradictory, discourses onto a single, receptive subject. Keats is, by turns, desexualised within an overtly homoerotic discourse, and sanctified as an icon of sensual beauty despite being valued as a commercially viable asset. Keats figures as a mode of exchange, a commodity to invest in and accrue profitable rewards; a literary ideal, through which canonicity can be attained for the present-day artist; and a means of male bonding where homoerotic desires are endorsed within a ‘cultured’ discourse. The Romantic poet is translated into terms which define and reinforce



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the High Victorian perception of a ‘great’ poet. In short, Keats is utilised as a sign for the Rossettian persona. However, in addition to acknowledging the apparent dominion of the present over the past, the opposite of this equation merits discussion. It is necessary to state that this section of the chapter deals largely with the mediator/beloved aspect of Girard’s triangle. As the questor, Caine reveals the ascendancy of the consummate artist, that is Rossetti, and highlights the homoerotic tendencies of their written exchanges over Keats. In referring to Rossetti as the Self in this section, I am not suggesting that he has adopted Caine’s role and lost his guardianship over the object of desire; rather, I am situating Rossetti in a binary opposition with the subject. In Bakhtin’s theory of the Self and the Other, the feminised object is subservient to masculine mastery, as has been demonstrated in Part I: yet, paradoxically, the object attains an enigmatic power.54 The dichotomy of Self and Other disintegrates into a tense symbiosis, a co-dependency with both elements interacting to produce art. Bakhtin is not furthering a model of democracy – remaining aware of the dynamics that structure the creative act – but he stresses the Self’s basic need for the Other. The living artist is not self-sufficient, relying upon the vital stimulus of the object. Bakhtin perceives a strong bond between the Self and the Other that is based upon necessity and, significantly, trust (although he does not specify whether such trust is mutual or emanates solely from the Self). Likewise, Girard’s mediator only attains significance by virtue of the beloved, leading to a conviction in the ‘priority of the Other in desire’ (Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, p. 46). Both Bakhtin and Girard accredit the importance of the Other, and it is with this revised approach to the beloved that I shall be re-examining the relationship between Keats and Rossetti. However, there are significant differences between the way in which Bakhtin and Girard formulate the interaction between artist and subject. Whereas the former values the companionableness between Self and Other, the latter sets them apart through a discourse of mistrust and hatred: Romantic passion is thus exactly the reverse of what it pretends to be. It is not abandonment to the Other but an implacable war waged by two rival vanities. (p. 108)




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Viewing the relationship between Keats and Rossetti in the light of Girard’s statement suggests an undeniable friction. Without any signs of overt hostility, the reader of Rossetti’s letters is made decidedly uneasy by the self-invested readings of the precursor. Yet I can identify no antagonistic anxiety of influence, no instance of envy, jealousy or rivalry – collectively forming Max Scheler’s theory of ‘Ressentiment’ – in Rossetti’s approach to Keats.55 Bloom’s theory of literary history, based on the misreadings between a poet and his forefather in the inextricable battle of artistic autonomy, posits an Oedipal combat that can never be won by the inheritor; he is inevitably paralysed by the strength of the precursor’s originality. Exhausted, the poet dies and leaves his legacy on the path of poetic diminishment.56 This apocalyptic reading hardly seems applicable to Rossetti when the worst he seems able to muster is a ‘Hyper-criticism’ of Keats’s occasional verse (Milner, p. 214). Rossetti’s representation of Keats’s life and work could be construed as an insidious misreading; alternatively, the artist could be embroiled in a positive Oedipal configuration with Keats as a father figure – particularly relevant given Rossetti’s quasi-religious worship of the poet. Either way, there is no suppressed anguish or anger that leads the inheritor to slay the symbolic figurehead of power. However, I do not intend to be overly dismissive of Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence. The notion of belatedness, ‘the exhaustions of being a late-comer’, is integral to my analysis of the relationship between Rossetti and Keats (Bloom, p. 12). Rossetti considered Keats to be the ultimate poetic genius, prompting a premature closure within that medium. Benson paraphrases Rossetti’s belief: ‘English poetry was fast reaching the termination of its long and splendid career, and Keats represented its final achievement’ (p. 80). As well as the financial inducements that drew Rossetti to fine art, his perception of Keats’s monumental achievement proved decisive in concentrating his career on painting rather than verse. Yet during the period of the artist’s life I have been examining, Rossetti found he was increasingly unable to make new departures in any artistic medium, ‘finding myself, as I grow older, more than ever at the mercy of my first sources of inspiration’ (Doughty and Wahl, p. 1815, n. 3). In the spring of 1880, Rossetti confessed to Caine that he was firmly entrenched in ‘the full bitterness of the Shadowed Valley’ (12 March 1880). Depression gradually blighted Rossetti’s



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spirits and he fell prey to what he called the ‘Sloth [that] jaundiced all’ (16 February 1880).57 Faxon’s study of Rossetti emphasises the weariness of his last years, portraying a man tragically dehabilitated by lost loves, depression, drug abuse and the fear that he was artistically past his best. She excuses the incompletion of his large-scale oil painting, ‘Mnemosyne’ (derived from the female figure in Book Three of Keats’s Hyperion. A Fragment), on the basis that ‘he was a seriously ill man [who] surmised that he had not long to live’ (Faxon, p. 213). Health problems thereby prevented a visual rendering of Keats’s poetry. Faxon suggests that ‘Mnemosyne’ was ‘the last major original painting that Rossetti worked on before his death’, but notes elsewhere that he subsequently saw ‘The Daydream’ through to its final stages and extensively reworked that composition after all mention of ‘Mnemosyne’ had ceased.58 William Michael Rossetti’s tabular listing of his brother’s art works states that the oil version of ‘Mnemosyne’ occupied Rossetti from 1876 to 1880, and lists twelve separate oils commenced during and after that time: as well as ‘The Daydream’, these include major pieces such as ‘A Vision of Fiametta’, ‘The Blessed Damozel (with predella)’ and ‘La Donna Della Finestra’. Admittedly, Rossetti was unwell during this period (although it is difficult to discern between genuine illness, hypochondria and the effects of completely severing the chloral that fed his addiction) yet, as Marsh states, ‘the breakdown only temporarily affected his career’ (Painter and Poet, p. 474). Business matters, including financial arrangements and negotiations for the exhibition of a major painting, resumed within a few months of the onset of the illness: ‘friends may have credited Rossetti with virtually miraculous powers of recovery, seeing how speedily he resumed painting, with a professionalism that belied the weeks of incapacity’ (Marsh, p. 456). Rather than slowing down during his final years as Faxon suggests, Rossetti writes that he was ‘getting on rapidly’ with commissioned replicas of ‘Proserpine’ and ‘Beata Beatrix’ (Doughty and Wahl, p. 1930). Moreover, the artist was completing new, ambitious projects in record time; Rossetti said of ‘Desdemona’s Death-Song’, ‘when once I chop into it I shall get on fast’ (24 May 1881). According to William Michael Rossetti, there were no detrimental effects of his illness and no apparent deterioration in his work, a sentiment echoed by Caine: ‘Weak as he was in body, his intellect was as powerful as in his best days, and he was just as eager to occupy himself’ (Recollections, p. 236).




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Rossetti remained industrious and his work was arguably as strong, if not better, than before the breakdown. Writing to Leyland, he expressed confidence that paintings begun at this time would be ‘a precious deal better than any as yet, I know well’, an opinion confirmed by Marsh: ‘Rossetti worked with greater concentration, perfecting his mature manner’ (Painter and Poet, p. 474).59 In terms of poetry, Rossetti was engaged with the forthcoming publication of Ballads and Sonnets and Poems (both 1881). Lewis describes Rossetti as enjoying ‘an Indian summer as a poet, even improving on his success of eleven years earlier by bringing out two volumes in October–November 1881’ (‘The Making of Rossetti’s Ballads’, p. 200). During the Spring of 1882, Rossetti was busy penning poems such as ‘Van Hunks’ and ‘Sphinx’; and only a week before his death, his brother observed him ‘writing some tale’ (1 April 1882; Rossetti died on 9 April). If we accept, therefore, that Rossetti was productive until the year of his death and correctly situate ‘Mnemosyne’ within the chronology of his works, the question arises as to why the painter abandoned his portrait of the mother of the Muses.60 Mnemosyne was the goddess of poetry and painting, providing a fitting tribute to the Keats, ‘word-painting’ precursor, by a man who mastered both verbal and visual mediums. It is, however, the very nature of the work, epitomising a ‘liminal event’ between the rival sister arts, which suggests a reason for such pronounced procrastination (McGann, p. 71). Within this symbolic marriage lies a potent source of anxiety: ‘ekphrastic fear’.61 Albeit intermittently, Rossetti was occupied with ‘Mnemosyne’ for four years at a time when he ‘grew increasingly possessed by the idea of the finished and masterful work’, thus revealing the extent to which he grappled with the ‘resistance or counterdesire’ that Mitchell identifies as a by-product of this artistic union.62 As well as being haunted by the Bloomian spectre of belatedness, the ekphrastic artist is relegated to the uncomfortable status of Other to the ‘original’ Self. This relation has evident implications for the power dynamic between mediator and beloved, and their associated gender relations. Who, for example, adopts the role of defining masculinity in an act of ekphrasis? The subject of intermarriage between poetry and painting has often provoked a ‘moral condemnation’ that is, significantly, gendered. C. S. Baldwin, for example, equates ekphrasis with ‘excess, disease,



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and femininity’, while Thomas Moore characterised this creative act as frivolous and full of ‘disgusting florid effeminacies’.63 Therefore, by visually interpreting another writer’s work, Rossetti forfeits the position of dominant, masculine creator. In his ekphrastic exchange with Keats, Rossetti becomes the translating feminised Other.64 Relegating the position of the ekphrastic artist even further, Grant F. Scott notes how this act has been historically stigmatised for its association with incest; as artists feed from the source, inspiration is internally consumed and the potential for creative art is minimised.65 In the previous chapter, I observed how the second generation of Pre-Raphaelites parasitically preyed upon the nearest forefather, giving rise to a weaker strain of the movement – inbred and, ultimately, sterile. In addition to the impending creative exhaustion of Keatsian sources towards the end of the Victorian period, the various ekphrastic taboos encountered in this proposed alliance proved instrumental in the abandonment of ‘Mnemosyne’. However, when we examine Rossetti’s previous attempts to interpret Keats visually, ‘Mnemosyne’ does not represent an uncharacteristic instance of painter’s paralysis limited to his ‘last phase’.66 A rough sketch of ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ c.1855 represents Rossetti’s fourth attempt to picture Keats’s lovers (Plate 13). Virginia Surtees states that the previous drawings ‘bear little relation to the subject of Keats’s poem’, and expresses her disappointment that they were not amongst the more successful early pen-and-ink sketches (Paintings and Drawings, p. 39). In this final version, Rossetti alludes to his source but through the title and the inclusion of a verse from ‘La Belle Dame’ within the actual composition. The visual realisation of Keats’s words within the sketch produces a somewhat defamiliarising effect that problematises the issue of ekphrasis still further. Even more noteworthy is the stanza chosen to adorn the sketch: I set her on my pacing steed, And nothing else saw all day long, For sidelong would she bend, and sing A faery’s song. (21–4) Rossetti selects the stanza in which the male protagonist is most assertive in a poem that predominantly portrays the powerlessness and languidity of the knight. These lines validate the pictorial




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representation of a forthright suitor who oppresses his lover. Also, in terms of the artist’s relation to his literary subject, this depiction of a dominant male emphasises Rossetti’s confidence in producing an interart interpretation of Keats’s poem. Yet if we regard Rossetti’s knight as a personification of the artist’s creative intent, the lady becomes a problematic figure. The Belle Dame recoils from the man’s touch, straining ‘sidelong’ from his advances; she is startled by the physical proximity her companion as he boldly kisses her hand. Her reaction undermines Rossetti’s assured masculine empathy with Keats’s protagonist. The lady embodies the painter’s fears of being lured, like the knight, into the enticing ‘elfin grot’, which promises a pleasurable interaction with the Other but realises only the nightmarish terrors of artistic paralysis (29). Rossetti’s simultaneous responses of attraction and repulsion, as manifest in his pictorial pairing, generates contradictory signals regarding this ekphrastic act and perhaps explains why his sequence of preparatory sketches did not result in an actual painting. This drawing provides an early example of Rossetti’s schizophrenic split between desire and inhibition, prefiguring the course of his artistic interactions with Keats. The problems of this sketch are not, however, limited to psychodynamics: it is inadequate as a piece of precursory art work. Rossetti was not proficient in drawing animals, unlike Hunt, and the arrangement of his human figures is equally deficient. The hero and heroine appear to belong not only to the different planes of existence in Keats’s poem – the ‘real’ and supernatural worlds constructed by the knight’s narrative – but to entirely separate pictures. Note the erect posture of the knight awkwardly juxtaposed against the curving lines of the lady, while the wind, which does not touch his hair, blows her tresses into a stream of locks. With regard to artistic awkwardness, John Beer reminds us that ‘one of the most common effects of everyday anxiety is a disturbance of fluency’.67 Admittedly, this is just a drawing, a setting down of ideas on paper, but when compared with other sketches of the same period, the difference in quality is unmistakeable. ‘Hamlet and Ophelia’, for example, is a far more detailed, accomplished and symbolically rich piece, and even its hastily executed understudy is compositionally stronger. Even though Rossetti’s interest in ‘La Belle Dame’ did not diminish, his artistic engagement with the poem ended with this sketch and, as



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discussed earlier, his later attempt to pictorialise Keats’s Mnemosyne was similarly abandoned. Yet, curiously, Rossetti engaged with a host of other writers. For example, the artist turned his design from Browning’s ‘Pippa Passes’ into a watercolour, ‘Hist! Said Kate the Queen’, and an oil entitled ‘Two Mothers’. His fascination with Arthurian legend similarly inspired a series of highly wrought illustrations for the Moxon Tennyson. However, the two major literary influences on Rossetti’s art were Shakespeare and the painter’s namesake, Dante. The work of both these writers remained significant to Rossetti throughout his life: one of his earliest pen-and-ink sketches illustrates a scene from As You Like It, while the last literary source the painter worked from was Othello. Equally, Dante’s ill-fated infatuation with Beatrice furnished Rossetti with a poignant discourse, both verbal and visual, to express his own illicit feelings for William Morris’s wife, Jane. As Marsh states, Rossetti adopted the Vita Nuova as ‘his life’s text’, thereby elevating his private intrigues to the status of artistic myth (p. 520). In the catalogue of his brother’s work, William Michael Rossetti labelled 43 major paintings as ‘Illustrating Dante’.68 Such a prolific relationship with Dante’s poetry highlights the peculiarity of Rossetti’s artistic engagement, or lack of engagement, with Keats. Less than one percent of the painter’s total output was inspired by the Romantic Poet. It would seem logical to suggest that the artist’s inhibitions originated from his ‘overpowering admiration’ for Keats’s verse (Benson, p. 76). However, Rossetti’s kinship with Dante was no less formative or significant in the process of defining the Rossettian self-image, yet the artist utilised the Vita Nuova for a veritable production line of symbolic female figures and narrative paintings. Reverenced awe for Keats undoubtedly contributed to Rossetti’s artistic paralysis, but this reading alone does not account for the rather specific and acute nature of this problem. To further another explanation, while the historical distance between Rossetti and Dante nullified any symptoms of anxiety, lending the artist a degree of licence, Keats’s stature was newly emerging. The proximity of Keats, combined with Rossetti’s active participation in the consolidation of the precursor’s reputation, eroded any chronotopic separation between poet and painter: Rossetti was confronted by the immediacy of his beloved and readily immersed himself in the ideal.




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Rather than Rossetti’s knowledge of, and affinity with, Keats culminating in an illuminating revelation or eagerly anticipated synthesis with the subject, nearness weakens the compelling desire of the pursuit. As Girard suggests, This desire is a corrosive disease which first attacks the periphery and then spreads toward the center; it is an alienation which grows more complete as the distance between model and disciple diminishes. (Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, p. 43, original emphasis) The root of this infection stems from Rossetti’s disregard for the significance of separation, the necessity of preserving a precarious balance between Self and Other (what Bakhtin perceives as the precious symbiotic struggle underpinning all great art). Once the difference between Self and Other is mastered and managed, no obstacle remains to be overcome by the vehicle of artistic expression. As I have already demonstrated in relation to ekphrasis, such claustrophobic closeness with the subject not only alters the power dynamic between Self and Other, but also affects gender relations. In this particular instance, the heterosexual painter is confronted with a disturbing sexual sameness which, as Sedgwick suggests, produces ‘the electrified barrier of homophobia’ (Between Men, p. 133). This ‘unmanning’, a symbolic castration that Lessing associates with ekphrasis, provides a further explanation for the ritual desexualisation of the precursor in Part I of this chapter. Equally, however, an indulged homoeroticism over Keats in Rossetti’s correspondence with Caine would have intensified feelings of resistance with regard to the subject and reinforced the painter’s disabling impotency. The horror of the latently homosexual Self represents just one manifestation of Rossetti’s anxiety. Barbara Gelpi argues that the author’s neurotic need for intimacy with the subject gives rise to the ‘negative feelings of fear, anger, hatred, self-pity, and a host of those other “bogeys” which caused Rossetti so much pain’ (‘Feminization of D. G. Rossetti’, p. 102). In Lucy Newlyn’s article ‘The Anxiety of the Writing Subject’, the precursor is seen as a two-headed monster paralysing the present-day artist.69 Lurking within poetic empathy is the spectre of recognition, the ghastly reflection of the Self in the Other (a reversal of the egoistic drive in Part I to see the Other as a projection of the Self). As Walter Jackson Bate put it, ‘in no other



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case are you enjoined to admire and at the same time to try, at all costs, not to follow closely what you admire [. . .] The arts stutter, stagger, pull back into paralysis and indecision before such a conflict of demand’ (original emphasis).70 The pressure to simultaneously ‘kindle and restrain’ the influence of the precursor creates a ‘double burden of anxiety’ that ultimately develops into a writer’s/painter’s ‘blockage’ (Newlyn, p. 623). Yet an even more discrediting fate than recognition is the guilty fear of repetition. Lewis claims that for the Poems of 1881, Rossetti was ‘ransacking all sources of poetry available to him, and so fearing the label of hack more than sensualist’ (‘The Making of Rossetti’s Ballads’, p. 207).71 The shameful feelings of deception that repetition engenders inevitably lead to the figurative death of the artist or what Newlyn refers to as ‘extinction’ (‘Anxiety of the Writing Subject’, p. 623). In his later years, Rossetti was so ‘soaked with Keats’ that the prospect of a phantom-like twin mocking his mirror image must have represented a very real possibility (Ford, p. 121). Newlyn also outlines an ever-present, murky middle ground between Self and Other that can prevent creative contact, acting as an unbridgeable gulf which remains unaccountable and genuinely ‘ghostly’ (‘Anxiety of the Writing Subject’, p. 622). Perhaps Rossetti’s increasingly frequent bouts of paranoia and neurosis towards the end of his life developed out of the knowledge that he had fallen from his chosen path and become lost in this limbo-like state. He required the Romantic precursor to aid him on his quest for pure, sacred Beauty in a bid to counter the so-called ‘fleshliness’ of his previous art and admit his entry into the canon: yet his attempts at Keats-based art only reflected back images of sensuality and sexual fetishism. Rossetti’s noble intentions, or contrived programme of poetic sobriety, were thwarted by the very agency he chose to affect his conversion thereby the painter in a realm of hesitation and self-doubt. Or maybe it is simply the case that he did not endeavour, in marked contrast to the Bloomian compulsion, to discredit and expel the influence of the forefather, preferring instead the alternate, and more congenial, form of uncritical worship that led to a frustrating impasse between emulative desires and prohibitive fears. The second part of this chapter has dealt with a succession of negative factors, from various forms of the anxiety of influence – belatedness, recognition and repetition – to the practical problems of




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physical and mental incapacity, the nature of ekphrastic art, the intimacy of aesthetic kinship, and the gender issues of effeminacy and homophobia, which to a greater or lesser extent account for the artist’s lack of visual engagement with the precursor. Unable to capitalise on his affinity with Keats, Rossetti remains redundant within the creative exchange. Rossetti’s relationship with Keats is not animated by inspired collaborations or the dramatic drive towards poetic parricide: rather, the present is unable to disengage itself from the past. As Ford suggests, ‘the essential thing is that with the spirit of Keats he [Rossetti] had no quarrel whatever’ (Keats and the Victorians, p. 95, original emphasis). There is no kenosis, an ‘undoing’ of the ‘precursor’s strength in oneself ’, without which, as G. Kim Blank argues, ‘we would be too open to influence, and never ourselves’.72 Thus, Rossetti becomes the passive receptor of the predecessor’s insertor. For all the progeny’s attempts to define the forefather, Keats retains his desirability as beloved and also adopts the status of mediator regulating the pretensions of the Self.



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Keats’s Belle Dame as Femme Fatale

I And the crimson haunts you everywhere – Thin shafts of sunlight, like the ghosts of reddened swords have struck our stair As if, coming down, you had split your life. I think that my soul is red Like the soul of a sword or a scarlet flower: But when these are dead They have had their hour. I shall have had mine, too. (Charlotte Mew, ‘The Quiet House’ [1916], 35–43) Rossetti’s inability to interact creatively with Keats, as discussed in the previous chapter, is not representative of Victorian painters in general. Whilst Rossetti abandoned his visual tributes to ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, a number of artists produced full-scale oil paintings on this theme. Arthur Hughes, for example, worked on a series of drawings during the early 1860s which experimented with the position of the lovers in the same preparatory manner as Rossetti. Yet, in contrast to his contemporary, Hughes completed his largest canvas to date based on these sketches in 1863.1 However, even though this painting and Walter Crane’s 1865 version of the poem highlight Rossetti’s singular relationship with Keats’s poetry, they do not indicate a 107



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trend towards pictorial renderings of ‘La Belle Dame’ at this time. In contrast to ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ and ‘Isabella’, images inspired by ‘La Belle Dame’ were strangely scarce during the mid to late Victorian periods. It is not until the fin-de-siècle and the first part of the twentieth century that significant numbers of paintings and poems directly refer to Keats’s ballad.2 Grant F. Scott reminds us that ‘it is “The Eve of St. Agnes” rather than “La Belle Dame sans Merci” that has long occupied the primary birthplace’ of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.3 Why did such an early favourite with the Brotherhood, ‘the germ from which all the poetry of this group had sprung’, remain relatively untouched while other Keatsian narratives became the subject of numerous interpretations?4 Why were certain poems by Keats popular in different periods of the long nineteenth century; and, more specifically, what factors rendered ‘La Belle Dame’ a more appealing visual source at the turn-of-the-century?5 This chapter will trace the development of visual representations of Keats’s ballad during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Victorian images of ‘La Belle Dame’ predominantly reproduce a misogynistic discourse that controls and inhibits the female subject, ‘sacrificing the letter of Keats’s poem to the ideology of established Victorian gender codes’ (‘Language Strange’, p. 505). However, the Belle Dame’s intrinsic power of metamorphosis resists absolutism. In Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth, Nina Auerbach states that the siren – a close relative of the Belle Dame – is ‘a creature of transformations and mysterious interrelations, able to kill and to regenerate but not to die’.6 The potential for infinite changes within this figure, channelled into Keats’s capricious ‘faery’s child’, occasions the regeneration of the Belle Dame over successive visual interpretations (14). Moreover, regeneration denotes a ‘positive feedback’ that indicates a connection between this icon and society; images of the Belle Dame can be read as both reactions to and generators of the cultural climate (OED). Scott argues, As Victorian cultural assumptions influenced many of the early period’s portrayals of the belle dame, so too the ethos of the New Woman and the suffragette comes to underwrite [. . .] later representations. (‘Language Strange’, p. 506) Impelled by ‘The Woman Question’ in Britain, we witness the Belle Dame ‘unfurl [her] awesome capacity for self creation [. . .] The



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mermaids, serpent-women, and lamias who proliferate in the Victorian imagination suggest a triumph larger than themselves’ (Woman and the Demon, pp. 8–9). This chapter explores the ways in which images of the Belle Dame reclaim what High Victorianism denied, and the subsequent effect of this shift on perceptions of Keats. The dramatic changes in representations of this poem over the long nineteenth century necessitate not only a re-evaluation of the Belle Dame’s position as Other to a series of visual interpreters, but a revision of the author/subject divide. The Belle Dame has invariably been regarded as a version of Robert Graves’s White Goddess.7 For example, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar list the various guises of the fatal woman, beginning with the title of Keats’s poem: ‘She is called La Belle Dame sans Merci, Geraldine, Moneta, Venus, La Gioconda, Cleopatra, Faustine, Dolores, Carmilla, Lilith, Salome, and Helen.’8 Mario Praz’s list includes other figures, such as the Gorgon, Syclla, Sphinx and Siren, whilst his authoritative chapter on the femme fatale is named after the poem that contained in ‘embryo the whole world of the Pre-Raphaelites and the Symbolists’ – ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’.9 Keats’s Belle Dame thereby becomes another face of the femme fatale, a standardised sign with a given signified. In fact, Karen Swann suggests that the Belle Dame represents the apogee of the archetypal Other. Even the mystery surrounding the Belle Dame, which formulates the ‘fatally ambiguous woman’, can be viewed as part of a romance plot that circumscribes her existence; the Belle Dame’s transcendent qualities are simply a reflection of her sirenesque nature.10 Surely, however, it is the ‘irreducibly ambiguous’ nature of the Belle Dame that admits Swann’s interpretation of the poem. The strangeness of the Belle Dame’s language and the physical descriptions that stress her ‘otherness’ prompt an examination, in Swann, of the male narrative (‘Harassing the Muse’, p. 83). In other words, the Belle Dame’s enigmatic qualities invite feminist readings of the text. It should be made clear at this point that I am not trying to argue against the Belle Dame’s position amongst these femme fatales. As many critics have demonstrated, Keats’s heroine can be read as the evil alter ego of womankind and the poem can be read as a parable warning against the dangers of male desire. Yet as the continuing debate on this ballad suggests, the Belle Dame’s significance is far more complex than a traditional position allows. She coexists




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alongside her fellow femme fatales, but this sign does not constitute her entire semantic field of reference. It is a testament to the Belle Dame’s indeterminacy that she is not limited to a single role. As Paul Edwards states, ‘Keats was not simply the inheritor of moral stereotypes, but of alternative traditions which involved dilemmas and contradictions.’11 As I will demonstrate in this chapter, the relationship between Keats’s Belle Dame and her sister sirens is a contentious and political issue. In Malcolm South’s Mythical and Fabulous Creatures, each of the names in the lists above merits a separate section which outlines the origin of the figure and its distinctive literary heritage.12 Furthermore, each reworking of the individual ‘type’ erodes any misleading assumption of homogeneity; Keats’s Belle Dame, for example, evolved out of a range of fictional sources. As Marjorie Levinson suggests, in the links it forms with canonical works, folkloric legends and oral traditions, Keats’s ballad operates within a series of ‘translation[s]’ (Keats’s Life of Allegory, p. 65). ‘La Belle Dame’ represents one point in a continuum of intertextual relations, echoing Kristeva’s belief that ‘writing reads another writing, reads itself and constructs itself’.13 Literary borrowings are not static but part of a Kristevan process of ‘becoming’. Contextual meanings are not preserved intact when relocated, and neither is the ‘original’ or earlier source devoid of ambiguity. Thus, what Levinson refers to as ‘textual dissonance’ within literary allusions weaves a network of creative spaces (p. 57). Accordingly, many poems have been cited as possible influences for Keats’s ballad. A brief discussion of two sources will ascertain if the Belle Dame reprises or reinvents the archetypal figure of the femme fatale.14 In the ballad of ‘True Thomas’, the Elfin Queen has few siren-like qualities; she is intelligent and powerful but not malevolent.15 The Queen endows the hero with the gifts of honesty and poetry, and also enlightens Thomas with her prophetic visions of war (at which point she cries for the widows of the slain). Before conferring these abilities, the Queen outlines her terms and the hero is given a choice over his future. Rather than a deadly and despotic opponent, Thomas’s Queen is a beneficent benefactor who is frequently described as ‘Lovely lady, fayre and fre’, and the prospect of Elfland is ‘the feyrest sight / That ever saw mon of the cuntre’. Critical consensus also cites The Faerie Queen as an important influence on ‘La Belle Dame’.16 As Edwards suggests, ‘the traditional reading of



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the poem would have us see La Belle Dame unequivocally as a malign figure modelled upon Spenserian seductresses’: yet even after critiquing this perspective, Edwards proceeds to discuss the demonic women in this text (‘Ambiguous Seductions’, p. 199). Certainly, Spenser presents Acrasia as a ‘wanton Witch’ with lustful appetites, an ‘Arachne’ spinning webs to catch a mate and ‘sucke his spright’ (II, 641, 683, 655, 691).17 However, Sir Guyon’s sojourn into the Bower of Bliss is described as a ‘pleasant sin’ that is equal to Cymochles’s experience with Phaedria (686). Another ‘wanton Damzell’, Phaedria also represents ‘the calme of pleasant womankind’ (II). The knight enjoys her ‘merry tales’ and ‘sensuall delight’ even though she will abandon him. Mistress of an island surrounded by a stagnant lake, Phaedria is also ‘Ladie of the flowring field’; the ground she treads can precipitate growth. Even a cursory discussion of these sources reveals why Keats’s Belle Dame has proved elusive to critics; her ambiguity accounts for, and also denies, the compulsion to categorise. Spenser’s sorceresses are companionable women who also happen to be deadly, and similar contradictions are inherent in Keats’s presentation of the Belle Dame; she is, by turns, warm, generous and indifferent. Ronald Tetreault notes how Keats’s ballad functions through anxiety rather than certainty, being ‘the fruit of an unresolvable tension’.18 Given the multiple possibilities afforded by evasiveness in this poem, the traditional position of Belle Dame as fatal lure has not gone unchallenged. In The Finer Tone, Earl R. Wasserman states ‘there is nothing in Keats’ ballad even suggesting the frequent interpretation that the fairy’s child is responsible for the knight’s expulsion from the elfin grot’, while Bernard Breyer and Charles Patterson see the Belle Dame as neither a saint nor a Circe, but the representation of an amoral level of consciousness, a state of awareness that is neither good nor bad.19 However, all three critics base their theories on the assumption that the Belle Dame is inhuman: either transcending (Wasserman) or outside earthly constraints. Freedom from stereotypes is therefore only possible if the Belle Dame renounces her womanhood and embraces an alien identity. Although Wasserman and others query the fairy’s part in the knight’s downfall, their alternative interpretations of her nature are equally troublesome. In accepting the knight’s description of her appearance – with long, loose hair, light foot and wild eyes – and his




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insistence on the incomprehensibility of her ‘language strange’, they are also accepting and reinforcing the ‘otherness’ of the female (27). Anne Mellor comments on the knight’s construction of his own nightmare-scenario and adds the following caution, perhaps this grotesque dream is a lie, or a merely one-sided version of events. Perhaps the knight, by believing the worst possible interpretations of the lady’s behaviour (put forward not by himself but by others: ‘You’re in love with a bitch!’ say her rejected lovers, in effect), has destroyed the love that they shared.20 Similarly, Gerald Enscoe identifie’s the destructive element in the poem as the ‘pale kings and princes’ rather than the Belle Dame (37). They are not simply the victims of La Belle Dame; they are her enemies. It is not completely accidental that these pale warriors give the enchantress her name. To them she is La Belle Dame Sans Merci, an evil, destructive, merciless witch who has trapped the unwary knight and subverted him from his true loyalties. The horrible irony of their warning is that their intrusion destroys the knight as well as the lady: they are the responsible agents for the knight’s subsequent desolation and withered state.21 It is the rulers of this feudal society, to whom the knight-at-arms owes allegiance, who label this woman ‘La Belle Dame’. Ironically, however, even though the kings and princes render the Belle Dame a recognisable type, a character within the romance plot, it is the knight’s description of the lady as wanton and wild that renders her evasive and powerful. Jacqueline Labbe argues that the knight attempts to control Belle Dame both physically and linguistically. His gifts indicate a desire to fetter the lady while his narrative consistently functions as a means to ‘appropriate her speech with his own words’.22 However, the lack of direct speech from the Belle Dame in the poem is not necessarily disempowering; rather, it reveals the knight’s inability to decipher her language. The Belle Dame’s silence effectively allows the knight to



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undermine his own credibility. The male community within Keats’s poem cannot see past the romantic conceit of the female Other as an object to be possessed by the hero: ‘The knight wants to make the lady a part of his own, very narrow identity.’23 The Belle Dame exists outside these rigid and formal constructs, inhabiting the creative spaces between textual affirmation, and escaping both the knight and interpretative explanations. Labbe comments that ‘it is up to the Dame to infuse her own strength into the poem’, accrediting the Belle Dame with the freedom to generate meaning within the text (Romantic Visualities, p. 111). The drive towards self-signification is a trait shared by many of Keats’s heroines. As Tetreault states, ‘whether goddess or nymph, angel or demon, virgin or whore, woman has an ambiguous status in Keats’s text’ and, as I have discussed in relation to the Belle Dame, ambiguity admits a measure of control (‘Women and Words’, p. 64). According to Tetreault, Keats displays a desire, common amongst the writers of his day, to project the female Other narcissistically and then engulf her within the Self. This is most evident in his love-letters to Fanny Brawne, in which his all-consuming passion threatens to swallow up her very being and deny the beloved an existence outside the romance plot he has devised. Yet, equally, Keats recognised his dependence on the subject when he wrote to Fanny, ‘You have absorb’d me’ (13 October 1819). The seducer or consumer easily becomes the seduced/consumed. Keats ‘encounters in his love for Fanny something it is beyond his power to control, a power resident in the other which he seeks to assimilate himself. If he cannot possess, he is willing to be possessed; either way, he identifies “otherness” with self’ (‘Women and Words’, p. 67). In ‘La Belle Dame’, the knight’s compulsion to consume the Belle Dame is counteracted by her evasiveness, while a narratorial barrier of uninvasive involvement, even indifference, preserves the integrity of the subject. Unlike Rossetti, Keats recognised that conquering or possessing the Other was ultimately self-defeating. The knight’s desire to eradicate the Belle Dame’s independence leaves him literally and figuratively stranded in semantic paralysis. To summarise, Keats’s poem can be read in terms of a gender struggle between binary opposites. Yet this limits us to an uncritical acceptance of a single perspective that overlooks the carefully




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constructed indeterminacy of both the Belle Dame and the poem itself. Alternative readings become unavoidable when we consider the bibliographic debate over ‘La Belle Dame’. In the version of the poem that Keats published in 1820, the stanza beginning ‘I set her on my pacing stead’ marks the first stage in the lovers’ courtship. This is subsequently followed by two verses detailing physical intimacies (17). I set her on my pacing steed, And nothing else saw all day long; For sideways would she lean, and sing A faery’s song. I made a garland for her head, And bracelets too, and fragrant zone; She look’d at me as she did love, And made sweet moan. She found me roots of relish sweet, And honey wild, and manna dew; And sure in language strange she said, I love thee true. (17–28) The narrative progression of this version presents an arousing sensual display, including smell (‘fragrant zone’) and taste (‘relish sweet’), which culminates in the line, ‘I love thee true’ (22, 25, 28). The verse ending in the erotically charged ‘sweet moan’ immediately precedes the fairy’s avowal of love, suggesting that her affection is a genuine response to consummated passions. In the elfin grot, the fairy ‘gaz’d’ on her partner (30), rather than ‘lullèd’ as in the popular 1848 version, which indicates adoration as opposed to enchantment (33). In addition, the line ‘And there we slumber’d on the moss’ significantly contradicts a discourse of sexual antagonism: we are presented with a coupling rather than a conquest (33). By contrast, the 1848 text situates the ride on horseback between the verses describing his love tokens and her tasty offerings. I made a garland for her head, And bracelets too, and fragrant zone; She look’d at me as she did love, And made sweet moan.



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I set her on my pacing steed And nothing else saw all day long; For sideways would she lean, and sing A faery’s song. She found me roots of relish sweet, And honey wild and manna-dew; And sure in language strange she said, ‘I love thee true.’ (17–28) The reciprocal nature of courtship rites in the 1820 text is here disrupted by the knight’s assertive physical act: the mutuality of their relationship is therefore lost. The Belle Dame’s song no longer prompts his devotion; instead, it is followed by invitations that subsequently lead to the elfin grot. In this narrative sequence, the knight begins as the dominant lover, relating ‘I met a lady’, ‘I made a garland’, which is later replaced by ‘She found me’ and ‘She took me’, as the fairy becomes the active agent (13, 17, 25, 29). The 1848 text offers a reading of female predation and male entrapment. Thus, the 1848 version of ‘La Belle Dame’, the text recognised by most critics and students, is centred around a discourse of sexual conflict. Taken from the transcript of a letter Keats wrote to his brother, this version first appeared in Monckton Milnes’s The Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats.24 As Jerome McGann states, ‘that printing exercised great authority over later editions’, yet Milnes neither noted the source of this version nor referred to other extant versions.25 In addition, McGann questions the character of the men entrusted with the ‘authenticity’ of the 1848 edition of ‘La Belle Dame’, specifically Milnes and Keats’s friend, Charles Brown. The latter’s ‘attitudes towards women in general, and his crude behaviour to Fanny Brawne in particular, are notorious [and] for his part, Milnes had an enormous library of erotica and pornographic works’ (Beauty of Inflections, p. 36). In short, McGann argues that Milnes, through Brown, consciously selected the version of ‘La Belle Dame’ which was open to misogynistic readings (in accordance with his dubious pastimes). Crucially, the 1848 text was amenable to the Aesthete’s model of the siren as ‘always the same type of unrestrained, imperious, cruel beauty’ (Praz, p. 227). Rossetti’s drawing of ‘La Belle Dame’ (c.1855), discussed in the previous chapter, reproduces this portrait of female




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sexuality (see Plate 13). In the arrangement of Rossetti’s figures, Virginia Allen discovers a source for the sketch – Theodore von Holst’s ‘A Scene from Goethe’s Faust’.26 The central character in this composition is the siren, to which Rossetti’s Belle Dame owes a greater debt than to Keats’s Belle Dame. The visual image is a substantial departure from Keats, who says of the Belle Dame only that ‘her hair was long, her step was light, and her eyes were wild’. In Rossetti’s hands, Keats’s Belle Dame has metamorphosed into a Lilith-like image, imprisoning her lover with her hair – a femme fatale. (‘One Strangling Golden Hair’, p. 287) Another prototype for Rossetti’s Belle Dame can be found in one of the possible sources for Keats’s ballad. In ‘The Mermaid of Galloway’, a suitor asks his beloved for a love-token; in response, she binds his head with her hair and burns his flesh, thus branding him as her property. Inherent within the hair trope is both the attraction to and stigma of an enslavement to sexual desire. Keats noticeably ignores this aspect of his heroine’s heritage whereas Rossetti prioritises it. The suggestion of a sirenesque nature through hair that encircles and strangles the victim caused Rossetti problems in terms of alterations to his sketch and contributes to the compositional weakness noted in the previous chapter. Initially, the Belle Dame’s hair flowed down the side of her neck, accentuating the line of her body and the v-shape formed by the space between the two figures. In the final stage of the sketch, however, the sympathetic lines have been scraped into a sharp hook, ‘the great sweep of hair terminating in the braid coiled around the knight’s throat’ (Allen, p. 288). In effect, Rossetti compromises the stylistic success of the piece to exaggerate the serpentine and sexually charged tresses of the femme fatale. During the nineteenth century, lethal tresses became an intrinsic part of the siren, a metonymic representation of deviant womanhood that appealed to Rossetti. The ‘serpentine interfusion’ of female body parts became a standard feature of his later work; for Rossetti, a woman’s hair was a measure of her inherently vicious nature (Auerbach, p. 48). The Belle Dame becomes subject to the artist’s homogenising gaze, reminding us of both the knight’s and the feudal lords’ restricted view of the Belle Dame.



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Rather than the ‘spiritually ambiguous powers’ that Auerbach detects in Rossetti’s female icons, his formulaic style is not sensitive to the individuality of his models or, indeed, the complex sub-categories of the siren (p. 51). Rossetti does not preserve the mutability of the Belle Dame, preferring instead the Aesthetes’ image of an ‘implacable idol’ (Praz, p. 227).

II As Praz suggests, ‘the type of fatal beauty was [. . .] fixed’ by the Aesthetes (p. 251). Rossetti’s female icons, including the figure of the Belle Dame, deviate little from a monolithic presentation of deadly womanhood. Ambiguity has been exchanged for artistic authority.27 However, the siren was not the sole property of Rossetti or his fellow Aesthetes; numerous painters and poets were inspired by this figure. A poem by Madison Julius Cawein, entitled ‘Lilith’s Lover’, relies on a Rossettian rhetoric while also subverting this position. Cawein’s debt to Rossetti is immediately apparent when he quotes a line from ‘Body’s Beauty’: ‘And round his heart one strangling golden hair’. Signalling a sirenesque nature, Cawein’s Lilith is cruel and ‘wily’ in her enchantments: yet the speaker accepts responsibility for his own desires, ‘O sin that was mine’, rather than transferring blame onto the woman for a shared transgression as in Keats’s ballad (19, 32). Mary Montgomerie Lamb’s ‘The Siren’ also works within the male tradition – the protagonist is a vampire who ‘suck’d his heart and brain’ – yet the femme fatale is also confident in her own acumen (‘mine must be the wiser way’) and her rule is ‘firm and fair’ (31, 53, 58). In contrast to Keats’s poem, where the man controls the narrative and the female is indirectly voiced, the siren is the speaker of Lamb’s poem. She provides a self-portrait and the use of ‘I’ suggests assertiveness: My teeth are whiter than the pearls Men seek beneath the brine, And when I shake my dripping curls Far brighter jewels shine. (5–8) Similarly, James Thomson’s ‘Siren’s Song’ is a monologue by the female protagonist (the title itself denotes self-possession). Rather than a fetishised projection of male anxieties, Thomson visualises his siren as a




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‘queen’ rejoicing in a sensual bond with the sea; she is ‘embraced and caressed’ while at ‘play’ in her own element (14, 18, 31). Alongside Rossetti’s and the Aesthetes’ drive to fix a model of the femme fatale, an alternative tradition was emerging. Whilst retaining aspects of the conventional victorian iconography, Waterhouse’s finde-siècle interpretation of ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ (1893) marks a transition in visual responses to Keats’s poem (Plate 14). As in Rossetti’s sketch on this subject, the woman’s hair is wound around the knight’s neck, weighing down his head and bringing his mouth closer to hers. According to Elizabeth Gitter, this painting is consistent with stereotypical depictions of the siren: ‘the kneeling knight, mesmerized by the gaze of the enchantress, submits to the noose of golden hair she has wound around his neck’.28 Reading the image from the traditional perspective of gender opposition, the Self through which we perceive the events of the story has entered the dark, alien environment of the Other. Waterhouse’s knight is merely a shadow of his former being, awaiting his place in the nightmare procession of ‘death-pale’ warriors (38). The paleness of the Belle Dame’s skin, highlighting her red lips, suggests a vampiric encounter in which her conquest is drained of his vital life forces. This painting is not, however, limited to a single interpretation. As Scott suggests, Waterhouse ‘problematizes her [the Belle Dame’s] role in ways that complement the subtle gender war we see enacted in Keats’s poem’ (‘Language Strange’, 522). Inheriting the negative capability of its source, Waterhouse’s Belle Dame can be viewed from multiple perspectives. Anthony Hobson describes this scene as one of love, not hate. The knight is drawn to the Belle Dame and voluntarily entwines himself in her hair, thereby generating an image of accord rather than conflict: ‘The two figures become an entity, and the intimacy of the scene among the dark woods is heightened by the unmistakably erotic imagery of the lance and the sentinel trees.’29 Waterhouse captures the ‘sensual immediacy of the moment’ with a sensitive and sympathetic portrait of the Belle Dame that contradicts the feudal lord’s description of a hateful whore (‘Language Strange’, p. 521).30 Hobson also highlights the ‘sadness’ of the piece and the girl’s ‘half-apologetic manner’, which is reminiscent of the line in Keats’s poem, ‘And there she wept and sighed full sore’ (Art and Life, p. 76). Anticipating Hobson’s approach, a contemporary reviewer for The Magazine of Art commented on the ‘tenderness’ of the painting and significantly



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Plate 14 John William Waterhouse, La Belle Dame sans Merci. 1893. Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt.



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identified the less well-known 1820 version of ‘La Belle Dame’ as Waterhouse’s source.31 This version, reprinted in Buxton Forman’s Posthumous and Fugitive Poems shortly before Waterhouse began work on his painting, affords an image of the Belle Dame as both transgressor and sorrowful suppliant. As Scott observes, ‘the pleading expression on her face reflects a mixture of melancholy, timidity, grace and charm that complicates any portrait of her as a bewitching siren’ (‘Language Strange’, p. 521). Waterhouse’s ‘faery’s child’ is neither a victim nor a threatening Other. Rather, it is the knight, with his shadowy countenance, who disconcerts the viewer. His ghastly monotones of grey and brown offset the luminescent purples and blues that sparkle with the gems, pearls and flowers of her wood. While the Belle Dame resembles a fresh spring, the knight embodies the end of autumn when ‘the harvest’s done’ and the stark glare of winter withers the sedge from the lake; the warm blood of life animates her veins whereas the despondency of death seeps through his (8). Viewing the composition as a product of the fin-de-siècle, the knight represents the symbolic twilight of Victorianism. More specifically, he is a haunting tribute to the genre of romantic realism in art with which Waterhouse attained widespread acclaim. The knight functions as both a memorial to a by-gone era in painting and the spectre of a passing age in response to the newly evolving embryo of the twentieth century. In a discussion of pre-First World War art, Wilfred Mellers and Rupert Hildyard suggest that ‘most of the post-war developments in the arts were already incubating before 1914’, while John Ferguson states: ‘As is often the case, those of artistic sensitivity seem to have had an intuition of what was happening and reflected it in their work before the final explosion. [. . .] The war was the culmination, not the cause, of the breakdown of the old world.’32 The preternatural and melancholy ‘gloam’ of Keats’s poem permeates Waterhouse’s version (41). A mood of enveloping doom highlights the fragility of chivalric notions of romance and the transience of human emotions. Mellers and Hildyard state that, ‘the years between 1901 and 1914 were years of tremendous social turmoil’, and cite, amongst other factors, the foundation of the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903 as a major cause of civil unrest (‘The Edwardian Age’, p. 8). Just before the outbreak of the war, suffragette demonstrations reached a new intensity. In his landmark essay, ‘The Hard and the



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Soft: The Force of Feminism in Modern Times’, Theodore Roszak suggests that ‘the “woman problem” had become one of the most earth-shaking debates in the Western world’.33 By undermining patriarchy, Roszak argues, suffragettism precipitated the First World War: a sustained attack on male dominance resulting in the bravado of battle. Waterhouse’s interpretation of ‘La Belle Dame’ not only reacts to the contemporary social context of increasing militancy by the Woman’s Rights movement, but also predicts the reinvention of gender roles during the First World War. My subsequent analysis will focus on the ‘sexchange’ of power in the compositional politics of early twentieth-century Belle Dames.34 Frank Dicksee’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ (1902) promises a bright future (Plate 15). The close, forbidding wood of Waterhouse’s version has cleared to reveal a picturesque landscape and radiant sunset. In an article on his work, Amanda Kavanagh focuses on Dicksee’s ‘obsession with light, [. . .] his preoccupation with atmospheric and luminous effects’; and in the blue, yellow and orange of the distant

Plate 15 Frank Dicksee, La Belle Dame sans Merci. 1902. The Bridgeman Art Library, London.




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sky, the red velvet of the horse’s reins, the pink of the lady’s gown against her auburn hair and the gleam of silver metal from the knight’s armour, this painting maintains the artist’s reputation for rich colouration.35 A contemporary critic of Dicksee’s work also comments on, the artist’s exceptional skill in the presentation of beautiful types of womanhood enhanced to the highest power of attraction by luxurious costume and accessories, all rendered with high technical skill and a spontaneous joy in sensuous beauty.36 E. Rimbault Didbin’s account of the artist’s talents is particularly perceptive in noting the prevalence of a female ‘type’ in Dicksee’s work, while also directing the viewer to a ‘sensuous’ quality that enables the painter to realise his heroines as women as well as icons. Dicksee’s Belle Dame is the sensual heart of the painting; the signs of sexual arousal in her flushed cheeks and red lips are mirrored in the colour of her long tresses and gown, whereas the knight’s armour reflects only pale hints of these impassioned tones. Scott detects a ‘suggestion of vampirism’ in this depiction of the Belle Dame: yet rather than viewing her as unequivocally evil, a ‘powerful and aggressive femme fatale’, she can be seen as a crossbreed of the Rossettian stunner and Waterhouse’s nymph – embodying, somewhat paradoxically, a voracious femininity (‘Language Strange’, p. 525). Moreover, it is not only an image of femininity that is subject to revision in this version of Keats’s ballad. As Joseph Kestner suggests, Dicksee’s painting is ‘central to contesting masculinity as a “monolithic position” ’.37 In a reversal of the anticipated compositional hierarchy, the lady is situated above the knight; she dictates her proximity to, and therefore level of intimacy with, the suitor. The knight grasps the horse’s bridle, but a raised foreleg in the bottom left-hand corner of the painting suggests that the lady is parting from her lover.38 This symbolic movement forward problematises the figure of the knight. While Dicksee clung to the ethos of chivalry, becoming a knight himself in 1925, his depiction of Keats’s ‘hero’ in no way corresponds to his description of



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the Happy Warrior who seeks the Holy Grail, whose armour is so well worn that it troubles him not at all, who is so complete a horseman that his horse is at one with himself, and in this wise with weapons that will not fail him, he can concentrate all his efforts on the quest that it is his ardent hope to attain.39 In stark contrast, Dicksee’s knight is left stranded, passive and ‘woebegone’ (6); he is encased in restrictive armour while the woman takes charge of his steed (literally and metaphorically holding the reins). In his commentary on ‘La Belle Dame’, Didbin describes this knight as a ‘wretched wight’, invoking the pathetically deflated, selfpitying and, in terms of poetic diction, archaic figure of the neglected 1820 version (1).40 A shift from Rossetti’s rendering of the misogynistic subtext of the 1848 version to the alternative, and somewhat subversive, gender roles offered by the 1820 version is becoming increasingly apparent. A reversal of traditional gender roles can be seen in Russell Flint’s 1908 version of ‘La Belle Dame’ (Plate 16). As in Dicksee’s painting,

Plate 16 William Russell Flint, La Belle Dame sans Merci. 1908. National Museums Liverpool (The Walker).




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this scene reflects the contemporary vogue for ornate medievalism and, more specifically, a fascination with Arthurian legends: the hero and heroine in Flint’s version also resemble Lancelot and Guinevere.41 A seductively light atmosphere is created through watercolours that merge to provide soft, gentle hues, yet concealed within this innocuous and pleasing image lurks a disconcerting strangeness.42 While the Belle Dame looks playful, she is also poised above the vulnerable figure of the slumbering knight who is basking in a post-orgasmic somnolence. The viewer cannot help but fear for the knight as his sword, a phallic emblem of masculinity, forms an inverted cross with the erect lance (signs of male strength are thereby neutralised). The landscape appears to be conspiring against him: one tree envelops the knight’s shield, his material mode of defence, while the other tree houses unsettling inhabitants. The overall mood and style of the work does not prepare the viewer for the host of ghostly faces peering out of the foliage, the most disturbing aspect of which is the indefinite number of eyes prying into the lovers’ intimate scene.43 They are evidently the ‘pale kings and princes’ of Keats’s poem, the feudal lords who sully the Belle Dame’s reputation. In Flint’s painting, these eerie spectres – reflecting both the Arthurian court and the patriarchy of the early twentieth century – intrude upon the privacy of their subjects and publicly repudiate the assumed position of the female figure. An alternative and equally pertinent reading of this painting is that the ghosts of chivalry, the spirits of knights past, have come to witness the final, symbolic defeat of a doomed era. As A. L. Baldry suggests, Flint’s ‘fantasies are convincing because he shows in them a regard for facts which relate quite as much to the present as the past’ (‘A Romanticist Painter’, p. 257). The spectres in the trees emphasise the contemporary relevance of the painting when viewed from the perspective of forthcoming battle. In Pat Barker’s aptly titled The Ghost Road, Rivers sees ‘Ghosts everywhere. Even the living were only ghosts in the making.’44 And in Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong, a soldier tunnelling in 1918 describes similar fears: As they crawled on Jack lost his sangfroid. He began to tremble and to brush imaginary hands from his face. He was in a gallery of ghosts. The souls of all who had died, his friends and their



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companions; the spirits of the men they had killed [. . .] all the needless dead of the long war were clasping at his face with their cold hands. They reproached him for having killed them; they mocked him for being still alive.45 In Flint’s painting, the knight is similarly isolated from fellow ‘heroes’; he is literally the last of a dying breed, a ‘powerful symbol for the end of empire’ (Scott, p. 530). Both Flint’s painting and his poetic source highlight the fracturing of past ideals or what Gilbert and Gubar refer to as ‘the shredding fabric of patriarchal authority’ (No Man’s Land, I, p. 21). The knight in Keats’s poem is distraught through nostalgia; his primary motivation is a desire to be admitted into a male lineage, ‘a community of poetic masters’ (Swann, p. 92). The pathos of the poem derives from the realisation that, as Levinson suggests, they are impotent signs (Keats’s Life of Allegory, p. 75). In Keats’s poem, the knight clings to the redundant discourse of man as protector: the Belle Dame is not a damsel in distress in need of rescue, hence the Knight’s ‘pale[ ] loitering’ (2). Labbe states that ‘Keats’s knight seems strangely caught out of time; although the tone of his narration makes the events he describes seem long ago, he himself has not advanced, either through time or the landscape’ (Romantic Visualities, p. 107). Similarly, in Flint’s painting, the viewer is taken back to an unspecified past, a legendary time when the knight’s existence is conceivable, yet he is rendered physically inert by his comfortable slumbers. He is the knight within a romantic ballad, but has no vocation; he is therefore unable to determine fantasy from reality or even define his own existence. To some extent, Flint and Dicksee are, like the knight, anachronistic. Both artists have traditionally been dismissed as practitioners of a belated Victorianism: Dicksee is labelled a ‘Post PreRaphaelite’, while Flint fits uneasily within the collective term of ‘Last Romantics’. Flint was famous during his lifetime for a ‘delicate romanticism’ and classical nudes in Mediterranean locations, yet Keats’s poem prompted a response to the contemporary debate on Women’s Rights (Baldry, p. 254). Likewise, Dicksee combined a ‘classical style [. . .] with romantic feeling’ to achieve a highly marketable product (Didbin, p. 4). In one of his most




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famous paintings, the prevailing ideology of ‘hypermasculine conquest’ is reinforced; the hero of ‘Chivalry’ is triumphant, conquering his combatant and claiming the reward of a sexually vulnerable maiden (‘The Male Gaze’, p. 182). According to Kestner, the knight-errant/artist accomplish[es] his mission of stabilizing culture.[. . .] Her gaze directed at her rescuer inscribes female victimization and worship of the male; the image of the knight caters to nineteenth-century male narcissistic ego formation. (p. 189) In stark contrast, Dicksee’s rendering of ‘La Belle Dame’ inverts the anticipated scenaries of conquest and subjugation. Even though Kestner tries to reconcile this painting with the ‘artist’s mission [of] power, domination, and authoritarianism, allied both to Facism and to art’, he has to concede that ‘La Belle Dame’ is ‘different’ (pp. 182, 183, 191). The painter’s political leanings were disconcertingly rightwing, yet here Dicksee invokes a Keatsian narrative in which new ideals struggle to separate themselves from the inheritance of the old.46 This version of ‘La Belle Dame’ undermines the patriarchal order of masculine and feminine spheres, and relocates the dominant spirit within the woman. Neither Dicksee nor Flint could be called Modernists – Dicksee, in particular, isolated himself with outspoken criticism of the movement – but, as I have shown, uncharacteristically progressive views surface when such artists interpret Keats’s ballad. During this period, the visual renderings of the Belle Dame that made a decided departure from the conservative view of gender relations were by a woman.47 Jessie Marion King produced three rather different works based on Keats’s ballad which reflect her complex and changing views on the poem.48 As one contemporary critic noted, ‘the stamp of a strong personality is seen on everything that is produced’, a view echoed by Scott: ‘King evolved her own highly individual art-nouveau style, which constituted a rebellion against the formal academicism of painters like Dicksee and Cowper’ (‘Language Strange’, p. 532).49 Outsiders such as King were fostered at the Glasgow School of Art where female artists ‘were able to develop a style and art practice that looked forward to the art of the twentieth century’ (Marsh and Nunn, p. 137). It is, however, important to remember that the early Glasgow style was indebted to



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Pre-Raphaelitism and, accordingly, King acknowledged the influence of Rossetti and Burne-Jones in her work. As discussed in Chapter 2, King’s interest in Keats extended to illustrating an edition of ‘Isabella’ – an evident result of Pre-Raphaelite influences.50 King’s Belle Dames therefore display both an indebtedness to and a conscious detachment from the recent artistic past, an approach which mirrors the ‘mixture of progress and retrenchment’ characteristic of all her work (Marsh and Nunn, p. 118). King’s combination of tradition and innovation is evident in all her renderings of ‘La Belle Dame’. Her illustration to Keats’s lines ‘They cried – “La Belle Dame sans Merci / Thee hath in thrall” ’, initially appears to inherit the legacy of Victorian conservatism, focusing on the fraternity between the ‘pale kings and princes’ and the knight (Plate 17). His cupped hands gesture towards the brotherhood and his attire indicates kinship. Rather than adding her latest conquest to this cohort, the Belle Dame tries to prevent his movement towards the group: but her lowly position at the foot of the drawing, hanging onto the knight’s coat-tails, suggests that her efforts will be in vain. It is not the woman who has bewitched the man – he disregards the maiden at his feet – but the lure of collegiality, a sense of belonging and the preservation of an old order. The Belle Dame is spatially peripheralised and bound to a chain of events she cannot stop (the rose design hanging from a thread of her dress literally resembles a ball and chain).51 Yet she is not utterly powerless; a garland of stars binds the knight to his beseeching lady and they remain visually connected by the haloes that crown their heads. As Scott states, this is a ‘provocative and revisionist drawing’, which shifts the blame for the knight’s thralldom from the Belle Dame onto Enscoe and Mellor’s villains (‘Language Strange’, p. 532). This subversive sketch shares more in common with recent feminist interpretations of the poem than contemporary readings. In the version drawn between 1900 and 1910, but more precisely dated at 1907 by Marsh and Nunn, the ‘pale kings and princes’ have disappeared and the knight has fallen to his knees (Plate 18).52 However, he remains positioned above the female, indicating a hierarchical dominance. The quotation on the base of the picture is taken from the verse in which the male courts the female, ‘I made a garland for her head, / And bracelets too, and fragrant zone’, suggesting a reading of the knight as an active force and the lady as his receptive foil




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Plate 17 Jessie Marion King, La Belle Dame sans Merci. c.1902. Reproduced by courtesy of Dumfries and Galloway Council and the National Trust for Scotland as copyright holders in the work of Jessie M. King. By permission of the British Library.

(17–18). This Belle Dame is winsome and devoid of any threatening intent.53 She is not, however, presented as powerless despite lacking a predatory aspect. Her head is framed by an illuminated halo which radiates shafts of light onto the knight. King’s ‘elfin Madonna’ is a



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shrine at which the knight worships (‘Language Strange’, p. 535). This visual trope echoes numerous nineteenth-century depictions of the attainment of the Holy Grail from its angelic protector and also Rossetti’s early portraits of the Virgin Mary.54 Yet while King’s vision of the Belle Dame may have been influenced by Arthurian scenes and Rossetti’s early religious works, the compositional arrangement of her figures shares few similarities with the precursor’s 1855 sketch on this theme. In contrast to the forced closeness between Rossetti’s figures, the lady in King’s interpretation is spatially separate from the knight and




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therefore retains her integrity. Intimacy is generated not by a grasped hand but the delicacy of touch; King’s lovers embrace through their slender fingers and expressive eye contact, recalling line thirty of the 1820 text, ‘And there she gaz’d and sighed deep.’ King’s version encourages a reading of communion rather than conflict between the sexes. The theme of mutual love is explored further in King’s pen-and-ink fan design of ‘La Belle Dame’, c.1908 (Plate 19). From left to right, a series of seamless vignettes construct a visual narrative of Keats’s ballad. The lady occupies the central position at the apex of the fan; she bends towards the depiction of the knight on the left of the design as he leans forwards against the inner curve of the design – the male is therefore looking up at the female. The intense gaze shared by the lovers in the 1907 version is evident here, yet the dense foliage growing between them suggests an imminent separation. This shrubbery also recalls Burne-Jones’s painting ‘The Briar Wood’, part of the Briar Rose sequence, in which suitors become enmeshed in the deadly undergrowth. This ominous sign seems to be averted by a small scene of the lovers huddled together on the right-hand side of the fan. Their embrace is not sexual, resembling the close alliances of childhood; rather than a devastatingly attractive woman whose charms lure unsuspecting men, this Belle Dame is girlishly innocent. However, we view this scene through the frame of a cobweb, the epicentre of which falls across the lady’s face, indicating that she is




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either the subject or the architect of doom. If this web is the visual representation of Keats’s narrative – with strands linking objects like words – then King is suggesting that both the hero and the heroine are caught in the machinations of the plot. Yet directly beneath this scene, the figure of the lifeless knight is laid out across the bottom edge of the fan.55 The relation of prey and predator is shown as the inevitable conclusion of the lovers’ union; threads of the web link the prostrate knight to the regal woman who presides over the entire design. The hero’s halo, denoting virtue, seems to create a kind of protective bubble around the upper-half of his inert figure, but the spider’s web above him and the poppies that carpet the floor beside him indicate a tragic end. This version of ‘La Belle Dame’ is the first interpretation to prioritise the Keatsian themes of degeneration and decay. These issues are highlighted by the medium chosen by King – the fan – which suggests the cycle of Nature and poetic/artistic composition whilst also reminding us of the knight’s unseasonable fruitlessness.56 There is a sense of continuity without progression in this semi-circular form. The viewer’s gaze travels from the dead form of the knight back to the beginning of the visual narrative where the hero is once again attempting to win the female. The compulsion to court, and the resulting waste of his youth and vigour, constitutes an unavoidable and recurring path; the hero and the heroine are thereby circumscribed by the conventions of the romance genre or, at least, the knight’s pessimistic version of their liaison. Yet King does not limit her vision to a single perspective. Accompanying death and despondency is rebirth; the female assumes the role traditionally held by the male as the creative nucleus of both the narrative and the composition. Not until after the First World War will images of the Belle Dame again include an empowered position for the female, the fall of the knight and the symbols of the web and the poppy. Moreover, no other pre-war interpretation of Keats’s ballad complements the sombre and eerily prefigurative mood of Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’: King’s 1908 version presents a stark portrait of the ‘Century’s corpse outleant’, while the harsh lines of the naïvely painted trees in the 1907 version echo the description of ‘tangled bine-stems scored the sky’ (10, 5). The latter image foreshadows the knotted wasteland of trench warfare as captured in the work of John and Paul Nash, and the landscape of ‘dark wood[s]’ and ‘cork-screw stapled trip-wire / to snare among the briars’ in David Jones’s In Parenthesis.57




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In Frank Cadogan Cowper’s post-war interpretation of ‘La Belle Dame’, the reappearance of King’s fallen knight assumes a deeper relevance (Plate 20). A recognisable feature of Cowper’s work, along with his Pre-Raphaelite attention to detail and striking use of colour, is the female focus and male figure lying prostrate across the base of the canvas.58 Painted just eight years after the end of the First World War, the knight in this rendering of ‘La Belle Dame’ is devoid of all signs of life; the cobweb which festooned much of King’s fan design is now concentrated over his face. As Scott states, ‘the spider web woven like a veil over his face and the grass that creeps up around his armor bespeak a [. . .] permanent condition. Like a corpse, he is laid out on the field of battle’ (‘Language Strange’, p. 530). Rapid societal change has spun its sentence over this relic of the romance genre. To set this reading in a historical context,

Plate 20 Frank Cadogan Cowper, La Belle Dame sans Merci. 1926. The Bridgeman Art Library, London.



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Asa Briggs states that by the end of 1914, the dead already included six knights and eighty-four sons of knights. Lord Beaverbrook proclaimed, ‘the public had no heroes’ while Wyndam Lewis described the soldiers of the Great War as ‘a pretty sorry set of knights’.59 Cowper works within the visual rhetoric of chivalry, but rather than glorifying war, like many late Pre-Raphaelite artists, the artist employs this imagery to expose its inadequacies. Cowper subverts the traditional view of knight as protector of a defenceless woman. As Kestner comments, ‘armoured but impotent, the image presents the paradox of masculinity so concentrated in Keats’s text’ (Masculinities in Victorian Painting, p. 111). None of the visual interpretations in the second section of this chapter present an unproblematic correlation between the male figure and a heroic ideal, but it is Cowper’s knight, in particular, who suffers the emblematic blow of the age.60 Reminiscent of King’s fan design, the landscape of Cowper’s painting is carpeted with poppies. Such an abundance of this flower signals the fate of the knight. The Flanders poppy grew where soldiers fell, and thereby became a fitting memorial for the dead of the First World War and subsequent conflicts. In terms of regeneration, the corpse provides nutrients for the growth of these flowers. In the words of Isaac Rosenberg, ‘Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins / Drop, and are ever dropping’ (‘Break of Day in the Trenches’, 23–4). In Cowper’s painting, the red of the poppies – signifying lifeblood and rebirth – is echoed in the Belle Dame’s sweeping velvet gown. Like Dicksee’s lady, this siren is visually stunning: here, however, her gown has graduated from pretty pink to startling crimson, passionate playfulness maturing into an awesome selfconfidence. Dashiell Hammett, the mystery novelist, states that ‘in the nineteenth century men were confident, the women were not but in the twentieth century the men have no confidence’,61 a sentiment borne out by D. H. Lawrence: All the while, I swear, my soul lay in the tomb – not dead, but with a flat stone over it, a corpse, become corpse-cold. [. . .] Yet I was not dead – only passed over – trespassed.62 Like Keats’s knight, Lawrence describes a death-in-life, a terrifying paralysis resulting from a perceived violation. The knight’s existence




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in ‘La Belle Dame’ similarly constitutes an aberration. As Labbe states, ‘although armed, he fights not; although a Knight, he neither rides, nor feasts, nor in any other way acts’ (Romantic Visualities, p. 108). Bereft of his vocation and denied his birthright, the knight represents an inversion of the heroic ideal; and in this way, he prefigures the collective experience of men during the First World War. Ferguson describes ‘The Menin Road’ by Paul Nash in the following terms: ‘The soldiers, hardly noticeable at first, are alien intruders moving across a scene where they have no right to be’ (The Arts in Britain, p. 113). The reality of war is depicted here as the antithesis of chivalry. William Orpen’s ‘A Village: Evening’ (1917) depicts a similar scene. The village is a series of ruins that dominate the horizon, below which a line of diminutive, shadowy figures advance. In the foreground, a soldier lies crumpled in the soil; his contorted face suggests an agonising death or the scream of one not yet released from torment. This figure can be seen as a visual realisation of Lawrence’s fears and a haunting prefiguration of Cowper’s knight in ‘La Belle Dame’. The male figures in both Orpen and Cowper’s paintings occupy a paradoxically marginalised foreground which mirrors Lawrence’s perception of death encroaching on a narrowing existence. Cowper’s Belle Dame thereby attains supremacy through the peripheralisation of the male figure. The dead ‘hero’ occupies a horizontal position at the base of the painting while the female maintains the vertical; presiding over the vanquished knight facilitates her compositional prominence. The heated discourse over gender roles at this time centred on the ‘asymmetrical impact of the Great War on men and women, [. . .] western culture’s traditional gender arrangements was a parasitic one in which men and women fought against, and fed upon, each other’ (No Man’s Land, I, p. 76). Conservative critics envisaged women consuming male strength at a time of national crisis; figuratively, women were moving forwards in terms of the gender debate, making up the ground that men on the battlefield literally could not reclaim. While men experienced the first part of the twentieth century as what W. H. Auden called the ‘Age of Anxiety’, women experienced an ‘era of exuberance’.63 Such women had, as Dorothy Goldman suggests, ‘adopted new patterns of thought, new lives and sometimes new identities’.64



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Where late-nineteenth-century literature men had become obsessed by the threatening and predatory figure of the femme fatale, a merciless siren [. . .] modernist men were haunted by a new kind of destructive female: the flapper, a figure whose daunting ease [. . .] and unnerving sexual freedom were manifested by her short skirts and bobbed hair, her feverish dancing. (Literature by Women, p. 1218) According to this description, the post-war heroine is none other than a neo-siren, the refashioned image concealing a predictable personality. As the Belle Dame became synonymous with the archetypal femme fatale of the High Victorian period, so the New Woman becomes another face of female malevolence. The ‘notorious American femme fatale’ Victorian Woodhull recalled a statement that she attributed to the poet William Cullen Bryant: ‘the terrible syren has defeated you and charmed your cohorts and battalions to silence and inaction’.65 Cowper’s Belle Dame can be seen as a visual enactment of this statement, a reworking of the traditional reading of the 1848 text in which Keats’s remorseless siren bewitches her prey. This post-war Belle Dame is therefore the re-embodiment of the Aesthetes’ femme fatale, the red gown in Cowper’s painting indicating not only vitality but the stain of her crimes: ‘Behold, the ages of men are dead at her feet; the blood of the world is on her hands.’66 Heavily indebted to de Sade, Swinburne’s dramatic assertion is echoed in much of the literature of the period. John Byrne Leicester Warren’s poem ‘Vitanda est Improba Siren’ pictures the siren ‘sitt[ing] throned on hidden bones of men’ (30), Madison Julius Cawein’s is ‘Pale with the past’s sweet ghosts’ (‘Siren Sands’, 57), while Pater describes his Gionconda in the following terms: ‘Hers is the head upon which all “the ends of the world are come.” ’ 67 In response, many women writers attempted to reclaim the figure of the femme fatale from this male-dominated discourse. In Woman and War, for example, Olive Schreiner employs a sirenesque rhetoric to determine the primacy of the New Woman, while Ella Wheeler



In keeping with the changing social climate, pre- and post-war representations of the Belle Dame are significantly different, but what characterises this new, ‘Cowperesque’ identity?

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Wilcox’s poem ‘The King and the Siren’ (1917) similarly subverts the tradition from within (Appendix 10).68 Wilcox’s siren berates the female icons of the past for being ‘feeble queens [who] lost their own identity’ (9–12). To distance herself from these figures, the present heroine exclaims, ‘I’ll show my power to the end’, and usurps the place of the ‘vain King’ (6, 33). This siren assumes her rightful place and overthrows male despotism: ‘she dug his grave’ – literally and metaphorically – and then, like the Belle Dame, ‘left him, old, and weak, and blind’ (44, 45). The Great War may have been won by the Allied Powers but, according to Sylvia Townsend Warner, ‘the great civil war’ between the sexes was won by magiwomen (cited in No Man’s Land, I, p. 119). The siren’s latent potential to act as a role model for female pioneers emerges during this period. She embodies the New Woman but, as I have shown, an emphasis on female strength and wisdom remains open to right-wing interpretations. According to Gilbert and Gubar, to see the siren as ‘behind the forces of history [. . .] a secret cause that transcends and transforms the currents of events’ is also to see her as ‘a half-concealed fatality’, one who ‘carries the seal of a terrible priority’ (No Man’s Land, II, p. 8). In George Crabbe’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ (1905), the female protagonist is triumphant, a ‘Sovereign’ who ‘glories in her deeds’, yet she is responsible for the ‘Doom [of] hapless youth’ – a poetic prefiguration of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ (2, 10, 31). The arts fixated on a ‘murderous self-restoration’ by women, and Cowper’s Belle Dame can be seen as a realisation of this threat; she personifies the nightmare vision of male mortality (Woman and the Demon, p. 8). The paralysis which infects the ‘pale kings and princes’ of a distant feudal past in Keats’s ballad can now be transposed onto the barbaric of modern warfare. Rather than an icon of emancipation, a symbol of the liberty fought for across Europe, the siren assumes another position of power: mass murderer of an entire generation. Critics like Philip Wylie envisage an army of femme fatales: I give you mom. I give you the destroying mother. [. . .] I give you death – the hundred million deaths. [. . .] I give you Medusa. [. . .] I give you the harpies and the witches, and the Fates. [. . .] I give you the woman in pants, and the new religion: she-popery. I give



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The siren has infiltrated all aspects of society: she is not only hackneyed, but reviled for her prominence in Modern culture. The Aesthetes’ vision of the femme fatale is now employed as a vicious parody of the New Woman. Even the dubious power that Rossetti accords to his parade of female icons is stripped away; Lilith, the first woman of Rabbinic legend and the subject of a painting of 1867, becomes nothing more than a cheap commodity or prostitute. Situating Cowper’s heroine in the contemporary cultural debate over the siren is, in some respects, naïvely dichotomous, reducing a complex issue to one of female gain and male loss. First, inequality was not eradicated when women began to attain political rights. The New Woman was, according to Scott, ‘more a literary construction than a political reality’ (‘Language Strange’, p. 519). Secondly, the liberation that many women demanded was an ‘unsought identity’ for others, especially older generations (Goldman, p. 6). Thirdly, and most significantly, the commentaries above derive from, or respond to, a patriarchal perspective of female emancipation that is just as misleading as the narrative of the knight and the feudal lords in Keats’s poem (Wylie’s reliance on the interchangeable ‘type’ of the femme fatale, for example, is akin to the traditional reading of the 1848 text with its inherently evil heroine). While some women of the period found the femme fatale to be an empowering image, murdering avenger preferable to victim, others saw the siren as injurious to the female cause. Even though Schreiner adapted male discourses to suit her own agenda, she also decried the way in which women were being debased by male fixations over ‘sex-parasitism’.70 Many feminists were not content with male definitions and female redefinitions of the siren or, indeed, a hypothetical reversal of the existing gender hierarchy. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s fictional blueprint for a female community, Herland, the ‘parasite-siren’ is replaced with the ‘fruitful mother’ (No Man’s Land, II, p. 74). Her utopia is centred on maternal nurturing and an abundant energy that is autonomous from male rule. This New Woman embodies the



you Pandora. I give you Proserpine, the Queen of Hell. The fiveand-ten-cent-store Lilith, the mother of Cain, the black widow who is poisonous and eats her mate.69

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earth, a creative life-source which, as Stephen Wrayford suggests in Birdsong, sustains the ‘same minute rotations of growth and decay’ even amidst the unnatural horrors of warfare (p. 358). Erich Maria Remarque’s protagonist describes the earth as a refuge, ‘his only friend, his brother, his mother’.71 Earth – in [. . .] the explosion of annihilation, in the death-roar of the shell-bursts you gave us that massive resurgence of reconquered life. The madness, the tempest of an existence that had practically been torn to shreds flowed back from you into our hands, and so we burrowed deep into you for safety, and in the speechless fear and relief of having survived the moment, our mouths bit deeply into you! Paul Baumer seeks out the womb of the earth, accepting the protection she offers, whilst a male-orchestrated conflict results in the waste of human life on a devastating scale. Within this context, women are regenerative and men are liable for the death and destruction of what she creates and supports. Cowper’s ‘La Belle Dame’ undoubtedly operates within the rhetoric and counter-rhetoric of gender opposition as outlined above. She embodies the vital essence of her time: the art-nouveau pattern of her dress and hair swept back to give the effect of a short bob impresses the viewer with a Charltonesque contemporaneity.72 From a narrow and simplistic perspective, Cowper’s Belle Dame is a propitious victor in this social revolution. For Scott, late versions of ‘La Belle Dame’ indicate the ‘total supremacy’ of the female: ‘By the late 1890s artists and illustrators had completely inverted the balance of power that prevailed in the Pre-Raphaelite renderings, portraying the belle dame as the dominant figure’ (pp. 526, 520).73 However, as with all interpretations of Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame’, an alternative reading is equally viable. The compositional arrangement and visual discourse of Cowper’s painting is not restricted to the habitual themes of domination and conquest, the well-worn war of the sexes, but also reflects a new ideology rising Phoenix-like from the corpus of the old. From the fin-de-siècle onwards, the Belle Dame and her sister siren shed the suffocating skins of binary opposition to generate alternative modes of expression. What I feel we witness through this succession of paintings,



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albeit framed by a largely male perspective, is the materialisation of a strong, bold and forceful female sexuality gaining social credence. Cowper’s female figure represents an icon of womanhood reborn, a realisation of Gilman’s prophesy that ‘the woman’s movement [. . .] is the best birth of our century’.74 By contrast, the male is drained and lethargic, a redundant former power who is literally and metaphorically entrenched in a previous age. While the Belle Dame embodies the reinventive quality of the Modern period, the knight is reduced to a symbolic archaism, a visual or verbal trope that has lost contemporary relevance. As Mellers and Hildyard state, ‘modernism’s strength lay precisely in its closure of tradition’ (The Edwardian Age, p. 24). The masculine Self no longer secures the artistic focus or determines the composition of the canvas. In conjunction with the traditional male discourse he represents, the knight is reduced to a subjective part of the plot as opposed to an objective ‘truth’. His symbolic status is demoted while the siren can no longer be viewed as a conduit, an ahistorical sign to complement the male ego. In effect, I have been charting a metamorphosis from Rossetti and the Aesthetes, through the tentatively re-evaluative pre-war Belle Dames, to the triumphant post-war Belle Dame – what Auerbach describes as ‘the recovery of the lost history of life’ (i.e. that which was denied by the stereotypical image of the Victorian siren, Woman and the Demon, p. 52). The regeneration of the Belle Dame, as an offspring of the siren, heralds ‘an ultimate triumph of otherness’ (No Man’s Land, II, p. 32).

III A number of questions arise. Can this reading be sustained by Keats’s ballad, or is Cowper’s painting the result of a sequence of interpretations that gradually depart from the source they invoke? Is the title no more than a tag suggestive of certain themes and figures that no longer bear any resemblance to the ‘original’? It becomes necessary to recall the importance Keats accorded to the Other, as discussed earlier in the chapter. Many of his later female figures, like Moneta, are invested with a maternal potency; Gilman’s utopia could be centred on just such a repository of strength. It is from this source that Keats’s poetic persona can




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realise his literary potential, yet the female’s role is not solely to serve the rising poet. Her power, which also constitutes the appeal of such figures to interpreters, derives from mutability. As Tetreault states, ‘the woman who thus escapes like literal truth is multifaceted and changeable, possessing in her transformations a demonic power’ (‘Women and Words’, p. 68). In Keats’s ballad, the Belle Dame vacates the scene when the kings and princes commence their judgmental narrative. She evades their objectifications, refusing to verify or refute the charges; what remains, therefore, is conjecture. As I discussed in the first section of this chapter, the male narratives are at best unreliable, at worst slanderous. Swann suggests that the Belle Dame’s ‘subsequent disappearance finally begs more questions than it answers. The knight cannot tell who the Romantic woman was, or where she went, or why’, but rather than viewing her absence as an opportunity for harassment, it can also be seen as a mode of self-empowerment (‘Harassing the Muse’, p. 81). Indeed, the Belle Dame ‘escapes like literal truth’, an ability that Tetreault describes as ‘demonic’. This does not necessarily bring us back to a reading of the siren as inherently evil, but actually reveals Keats’s reverence for his female creation. In ‘La Belle Dame’, the heroine directs events from behind the scenes; the knights’ unaccountable state is a by-product of her absence. Levinson states that ‘the Lady is the knight’s discursive creature’ – he attempts to determine her existence and thereby define his own in the process – yet a reversal of this relationship is possible due to the Belle Dame’s enigmatic silence and withdrawal which effectively undermines every assertion made by the knight (Keats’s Life of Allegory, p. 62). The Belle Dame’s indeterminacy reveals an aptitude for residing in negative capability as opposed to the knight who cannot exist outside of his narrow, internalised landscape. She is therefore the personification of Keats’s aesthetic of the imagination: ‘that which is creative must create itself’ (9 October 1818). Ultimately, the Belle Dame can be read as a literary embodiment of her author’s most prized poetic principles. If the Belle Dame – an archetypal Other – harbours the potential for Selfhood, what are the implications of this reading for Keats? As the authorial Self to the Belle Dame’s Other, Keats’s status becomes difficult to determine. The dynamics of this author–subject relationship



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are complicated further in the act of representation. In producing a poem or painting based on Keats’s work, the interpreter is accrediting the initial Self of the source. As Levinson suggests, translation creates ‘authentic’ art: While translation is an act of homage and an immortalising gesture, it is also inevitably parodic, inasmuch as it reifies the strong otherness and self-identity of the Original. At the same time, it is only the occurrence of the translation – a reproduction which, being later, is also, perforce, different – which constructs within the given semiotic system the phenomenon of Origins. This is to say, the translation projects that aura which it reifies and to that extent dispels. The worse the translation, or the more manifestly unlike its designated Original, the more firmly it consecrates that source work as eternal and inviolate, and the more devastating also, its violation of that innocence. The best translation is, by this logic, the worst: the most literal and the most significantly conscious of its literalness. (Keats’s Life of Allegory, p. 63, original emphasis) The ‘original’, in this instance Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame’, is ‘othered’ in translation whilst also becoming crucial to the success or failure of derivative works. Interpretation is, as Levinson suggests, a ‘substitution’: yet as I have argued throughout this book, representations of Keats’s poetry in art and literature generate semantic exchanges with the ‘original’ (p. 63). Interpretation enables us to see the source from a new perspective and, conversely, our appreciation of the source enables various readings of that interpretation. This positive feedback system sustains creative tension. The difference in medium alone, in terms of composition, colour and even the dimensions of the canvas, generates meaning or what could be referred to as interdisciplinary friction (adapted from Levinson’s phrase, ‘textual dissonance’). However, like dissonance, friction suggests discord. There is a danger in regarding interpretation as an equitable exchange that enriches both parties. Levinson argues that the interpreter is always disadvantaged and the ‘original’ Self retains ascendancy (its primacy reconfirmed with every act of translation). Why, therefore, would any artist wish to interpret another? In this




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instance, Keats’s indeterminacy, encompassing female figures that have been read as both misogynistic icons and emancipated women, invites extremes of artistic licence. This poet is popular artists and authors because he is easy to appropriate. Rather than interacting with the ‘original’, Keats is often decontextualised, invoked indiscriminately or even second-hand through other interpretations. From this perspective, the present has absolute power over the past. Keats’s otherness is comparable to that of his creations; as we witness in Wilde’s ‘Endymion’, for example, the author becomes another subject amongst his own literary figures. As is evident throughout this book, however, the Other does not remain disenfranchised. Successive literary investments in the precursor, which top into the inherent ambiguity of Keats’s poetry, empower the subject. Notable examples include Rossetti’s desire to ‘translate’ Keats’s life and work, which results in an aesthetic paralysis Hardy’s elegiac tribute to the overwhelming burden of the past and Wilde’s worship of a subject that inhibits his own poetic voice. At these junctures, the interpreter submits, willingly or unwillingly, to the recognised prowess of the forefather. Both Keats and his female creations overcome externally imposed constraints to reclaim their integrity. Cowper’s 1926 version of ‘La Belle Dame’ can therefore be seen as an apogee of tributes to Keats’s work. This painting is a testament to rebirth: but it must be remembered that this state can only emerge from death. In reading Keats’s fortunes metonymically through the figure of the Belle Dame, the degeneration of the knight has been overlooked. Whilst the Belle Dame’s aptitude for survival and Keats’s longevity are celebrated, the male protagonist is selected for extinction; the patriarchal conventions of romance, a genre that Keats worked within yet critiqued, are rendered obsolete. A primary concern of this book has been to highlight the contradictory nature of Keats’s poetry, and in this late interpretation the precursor is simultaneously represented by both the flowering siren and the wilting knight. In terms of the Self/Other relation, Keats has ultimately triumphed, but his extensive visual afterlife effectively ends with Cowper’s painting.75 By contrast, criticism, biographies and elegies of Keats have been constant literary features of the twentieth century. Respecting elegy, the Romantic poet has proved to be a mainstay



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of inspiration. From the Beat poets to Tom Clark and the Poet Laureate, Keats’s popularity amongst poets remains constant.76 Tony Harrison’s ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’ (1981) illustrates the extent to which elegy has departed from the egoistic anxieties of the nineteenth century, and also provides a brief afterword to this study of Keats’s posthumous life in art and literature (Appendix 11).77 Most significantly, Harrison approaches his subject through a discourse of consumption: Keats’s influence is represented by the sensation of tasting fruit. he’d [Keats] help me celebrate that Micanopy kumquat that I ate whole, straight off the tree, sweet pulp and sour skin – or was it sweet outside, and sour within? For however many kumquats that I eat I’m not sure if it’s flesh or rind that’s sweet, and being a man of doubt at life’s mid-way I’d offer Keats some kumquats and I’d say: You’ll find that one part’s sweet and one part’s tart: say where the sweetness or the sourness start. (29–38, original emphasis) Keats reveals to Harrison the poetic potential of residing in contradiction and uncertainty. The trope of the kumquat enables the author to explore ambiguities within the precursor’s poetry; Harrison notes the inherent beauty within the grotesque and the pain experienced when anticipating Keats’s sensual pleasures. An appreciation of Keatsian complexity also gives rise to parallels between Harrison and Keats’s seemingly disparate lives. Harrison exotic life in Florida evokes the luxury of his subject’s work, while the author’s description of his bleak youth in the industrial north reminds the reader of Keats’s lower-middle-class origins. Significantly, in recalling that there is ‘a century of history on this earth / between John Keats’s death and my own birth- / years like an open crater’, Harrison preserves the distinction between past and present (63–5). Both Keats’s life and work are being adapted to the agenda of the writing Self – he is proof that the working-class man can produce poetry – but, conversely, the subject directs Harrison’s perception and presentation of his own existence. For example, Keats’s poetry is used to articulate the horror




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of the atomic age: ‘a thing no bigger than an urn explodes / and ravishes all silence’ (67–8). Lines from ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ are appropriated and decontextualised, yet they also probe the poetic gulf between Keats and Harrison. Any attempt to collapse the boundaries between author and subject only serve to emphasise a disorientating irreconcilability. The final stanzas of the poem return the reader to, the point at which Keats’s posthumous life began and the starting point of this book. Like Shelley in ‘Adonais’, Harrison shifts his admiring gaze to the stars and Keats is absorbed within the anonymous gulf of the cosmos. However, Harrison proceeds to compare Keats’s energy with that of the sun – ‘night’s peeled fruit’ – which ‘floods the world with days’: basically, Keats provides literary illumination (95–6). In contrast to the portrayal of the subject in ‘Adonais’, the integrity of the Other is maintained; Harrison’s Keats is prized as an immortalised individual. Certain late Victorian and early Modern painters and poets moved towards an accreditation of the subject, most notably Oscar Wilde, Christina Rossetti, Alice Meynell and the post-Rossetti painters of ‘La Belle Dame’, but none of the works previously explored in this book generate such a productive balance between Self and Other. In general, nineteenth-century artists and authors were so preoccupied with self-fashioning that Keats became the means to an egoistic end; and those, specifically Wilde, who opposed or reversed this trend struggled to interact creatively with the source. Certainly, the female component of this book has valued Keats as more than a poetic expediency. However, neither Christina Rossetti nor Alice Meynell address the fundamental issues of appropriating a subject within the elegiac genre. Both poets confirm their appreciation of the forefather by sexualising the bond between author and subject; rather than an aesthetic partner, Keats becomes a potential mate. Harrison’s late twentieth-century elegy explores the complexity of artistic interpretation, and recognises the full creative potential and durability of the subject. Keats has survived the endless cycle of the literary corpus: the births, deaths and rebirths enacted by interpreters who are eager to provide the last word or definitive image of this poet. He has been strengthened by the process and now carries the weight of a posthumous life accumulated over



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some two hundred years. Keats is no longer creatively vulnerable, in danger of being ‘wasted’; each new interpretation has to negotiate, and must compete with, a wealth of other versions. Yet in contrast to Levinson’s theory, Keats’s status has not been attained in spite of the translations that consolidate his originality, but as a direct result of multiple acts of representation. The network of artistic interpretations generated by the subject combine to formulate what we experience as Keats. Ultimately, representation constitutes that which is represented.




1 When Death glides gently in a holy sleep 2 On some dear nursling of first infant years, 3 Not for the future lost, are then our tears, 4 Only the sadden’d present bids us weep: 5 The tender child, with sunny eyes and deep, 6 And budding love, and sweetness that endears, 7 And silver voice whose tone affrays our ears – 8 This is the idol in our hearts we keep. 9 And shall we mourn, thou Poet of the flowers, 10 That daisies bloom’d above thee ere the hours 11 Of perfect fruitage brought thy riper parts? 12 Ah lo! thy orient muse of life bereft 13 Dying, the immortal youth of genius left 14 A deathless memory in our heart of hearts.

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Appendix 1: Thomas Hall Caine, ‘John Keats’

I 1 Stand still, true poet that you are! 2 I know you; let me try and draw you. 3 Some night you’ll fail us: when afar 4 You rise, remember one man saw you, 5 Knew you, and named a star!

II 6 My star, God’s glow-worm! Why extend 7 That loving hand of his which leads you, 8 Yet locks you safe from end to end 9 Of this dark world, unless he needs you, 10 Just saves your light to spend?

III 11 His clenched hand shall unclose at last, 12 I know, and let out all the beauty: 13 My poet holds the future fast, 14 Accepts the coming ages’ duty, 15 Their present for this past.

IV 16 That day, the earth’s feast-master’s brow 17 Shall clear, to God the chalice raising; 18 ‘Others give best at first, but thou 19 ‘Forever set’st our table praising, 20 ‘Keep’st the good wine till now!’ 147



Appendix 2: Robert Browning, ‘Popularity’

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Appendix 2

21 Meantime, I’ll draw you as you stand, 22 With few or none to watch and wonder: 23 I’ll say – a fisher, on the sand 24 By Tyre the old, with ocean-plunder, 25 A netful, brought to land.

VI 26 Who has not heard how Tyrian shells 27 Enclosed the blue, that dye of dyes 28 Whereof one drop worked miracles, 29 And coloured like Astarte’s eyes 30 Raw silk the merchant sells?

VII 31 And each bystander of them all 32 Could criticize, and quote tradition 33 How depths of blue sublimed some pall 34 – To get which, pricked a king’s ambition; 35 Worth sceptre, crown and ball.

VIII 36 Yet there’s the dye, in that rough mesh, 37 The sea has only just o’erwhispered! 38 Live whelks, each lip’s beard dripping fresh, 39 As if they still the water’s lisp heard 40 Through foam the rock-weeds thresh.

IX 41 Enough to furnish Solomon 42 Such hangings for his cedar-house, 43 That, when gold-robed he took the throne 44 In that abyss of blue, the Spouse 45 Might swear his presence shone

X 46 Most like the centre-spike of gold 47 Which burns deep in the blue-bell’s womb,



V

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XI 51 Mere conchs! not fit for warp or woof! 52 Till cunning come to pound and squeeze 53 And clarify, – refine to proof 54 The liquor filtered by degrees, 55 While the world stands aloof.

XII 56 And there’s the extract, flasked and fine, 57 And priced and saleable at last! 58 And Hobbs, Nobbs, Stokes and Nokes combine 59 To paint the future from the past, 60 Put blue into their line.

XIII 61 Hobbs hints blue, – straight he turtle eats: 62 Nobbs prints blue, – claret crowns his cup: 63 Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats, – 64 Both gorge. Who fished the murex up? 65 What porridge had John Keats?



48 What time, with ardours manifold, 49 The bee goes singing to her groom, 50 Drunken and overbold.

1 A garden in a garden: a green spot 2 Where all is green: most fitting slumber-place 3 For the strong man grown weary of a race 4 Soon over. Unto him a goodly lot 5 Hath fallen in fertile ground; there thorns are not, 6 But his own daisies: silence, full of grace, 7 Surely hath shed a quiet on his face: 8 His earth is but sweet leaves that fall and rot. 9 What was his record of himself, ere he 10 Went from us? Here lies one whose name was writ 11 In water: while the chilly shadows flit 12 Of sweet Saint Agnes’ Eve; while basil springs, 13 His name, in every humble heart that sings, 14 Shall be a fountain of love, verily.

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Appendix 3: Christina Rossetti, ‘On Keats’

He said that the greatest delight of his life had been to watch the growth of flowers. And when dying ‘I feel them growing over me.’ 1 They waited not for showers 2 But made a garden in the dark above him, 3 – Stayed not for the summer, growing things that love him. 4 Beyond the light, beyond the hours, 5 Behind the wind, where Nature thinks the flowers, 6 He entered in his dying wandering. 7 And daisies infantine were thoughts of his, 8 And different grasses solved his mysteries. 9 He lived in flowers a snatch of spring, 10 And had a dying longing that uncloses 11 In wild white roses. 12 Down from the low hills dark with pines 13 Into the fields at rest, the summer done, 14 I went by pensive ways of tombs and vines 15 To where the place I dream of is; 16 And in a stretch of meditative sun 17 Cloven by the dark flames of cypresses 18 Came to the small grave of my ended poet. 19 – I had felt wild things many a dreamy hour 20 Pushing above him from beyond the sea, 21 But when I saw it 22 It chanced there was no flower, 23 And that was, too, a silent time for me. 24 O life of blossoms – Proserpine! 25 O time of flowers where art thou now, 26 And in what darkness movest thou? 27 In the lost heart of this quiet poet of mine 28 So well-contented with his growth of flowers? 29 Beyond the suns and showers 30 Stirrest thou in a silence that begets 31 The exquisite thought, the tuneful rhyme – 32 The first intention of the violets, 33 And the beginnings of the warm wild-thyme? 34 Indeed the poets do know 151



Appendix 4: Alice Meynell, ‘On Keats’s Grave’

Appendix 4

35 A place of thoughts where no winds blow, 36 And not a breath is sighing, 37 Beyond the light, beyond the hours, 38 Where all a summer of enchanted flowers 39 Do mark his place, his dying. 40 Sweet life, and is it there thy sceptre passes 41 On long arrays of flowering grasses 42 And rows of crimson clover? 43 Are these the shades thou reignest over? 44 Come ere the year forgets 45 The summer her long lover. 46 O Proserpine, November violets! 47 – Where art thou now? 48 And in what darkness movest thou 49 Who art in life the life of melodies? 50 Within the silent living poet’s heart 51 Where no song is, 52 Where, every one apart, 53 Arrays of the morn fancies err 54 Vaguer than pain in sleep, vaguer than pain, 55 And no winds stir;56 Over these shadows dost thou reign? 57 See now, in this still day 58 All winds are strayed and lost, wandered away, 59 Everywhere from Soracte to the sea. 60 All singing things muse in the sun, 61 And trees of fragrant leaves do happily 62 Meditate in their sweet scents every one, 63 The paeans done. 64 All olives turn and dream in grey at ease, 65 Left by the silver breeze. 66 Long smiles have followed the peal of mirth. 67 – But silence has no place for me, 68 A silent singer on earth. 69 Awake! 70 And thro’ the sleeping season break, 71 With young new shoots for this young poet’s sake, 72 With singing lives for all these dreams of mine, 73 O darkened Proserpine! 74 Out of the small grave and the thoughts I love 75 Stir thou in me and move, 76 If haply a song of mine may seem a dim 77 Sweet flower grown over him. 78 Oh come from underground and be 79 Flowers for my young dear poet and songs for me.



152

I 1 It is not then enough that men who give 2 The best gifts given of man to man should feel, 3 Alive, a snake’s head ever at their heel: 4 Small hurt the worms may do them while they live – 5 Such hurt as scorn for scorn’s sake may forgive. 6 But now, when death and fame have set one seal 7 On tombs whereat Love, Grief, and Glory kneel, 8 Men sift all secrets, in their critic sieve, 9 Of graves wherein the dust of death might shrink 10 To know what tongues defile the dead man’s name 11 With loathsome Love, and probe that stings like shame. 12 Rest once was theirs, who had crossed to mortal brink: 13 No rest, no reverence now: dull fools undress 14 Death’s holiest shrine, life’s veriest nakedness.

II 15 A man was born, sang, suffered, loved, and died. 16 Men scorned him living: let us praise him dead. 17 His life was brief and bitter, gently led 18 And proudly, but with pure and blameless pride. 19 He wrought no wrong toward any; satisfied 20 With love and labour, whence our souls are fed 21 With largesse yet of living wine and bread. 22 Come, let us praise him: here is nought to hide. 23 Make bare the poor dead secrets of his heart, 24 Strip the stark-naked soul, that all may peer, 25 Spy, smirk, scoff, snap, snort, snivel, snarl, and sneer: 26 Let none so sad, let none so sacred part 27 Lie still for pity, rest unstirred for shame, 28 But all be scanned of all men. This is fame. 153



Appendix 5: A. C. Swinburne, ‘In Sepulcretis’

154

Appendix 5

29 ‘Now what a thing it is to be an ass!’ 30 If one, that strutted up the brawling streets 31 As foremen of the flock whose concourse greets 32 Men’s ears with bray more dissonant than brass, 33 Would change from blame to praise as coarse and crass 34 His natural note, and learn the fawning feats 35 Of lapdogs, who but knows what luck he meets? 36 But all in vain old fable holds her glass. 37 Mocked and reviled by men of poisonous breath, 38 A great man dies: but one thing worst was spared; 39 Not all his heart by their base hands lay bared. 40 One comes to crown with praise the dust of death; 41 And low, through him the worst is brought to pass. 42 Now, what a thing it is to be an ass!

IV 43 Shame, such as never yet dealt heavier stroke 44 On heads more shameful, fall on theirs through whom 45 Dead men may keep inviolate not their tomb, 46 But all its depths these ravenous grave-worms choke. 47 And yet what waste of wrath is mine, to invoke 48 Shame on the shameless? Even their natural doom, 49 The native air such carrion breaths perfume, 50 The nursing darkness whence vermin broke, 51 The cloud that wraps them of adulterate ink, 52 Hath no sign else about it, wears no name, 53 As they no record in the world, but shame. 54 If thankfulness nor pity bids them think 55 What work is this of theirs, and pause betimes, 56 Not Shakespeare’s grave would scare them off with rhymes.



III

1 The weltering London ways where children weep 2 And girls whom none call maidens laugh, – strange road 3 Miring his outward steps, who inly trode 4 The bright Castalian brink and Latmos’ steep: – 5 Even such his life’s cross-paths; till deathly deep 6 He toiled through sands of Lethe; and long pain, 7 Weary with labour spurned and love found vain, 8 In dead Rome’s sheltering shadow wrapped his sleep. 9 O pang-dowered Poet, whose reverberant lips 10 And heart-strung lyre awoke the Moon’s eclipse, – 11 Thou whom the daisies glory in growing o’er, – 12 Their fragrance clings around thy name, not writ 13 But rumour’d in water, while the fame of it 14 Along Time’s flood goes echoing evermore.

155



Appendix 6: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘John Keats’

‘The Grave, of Keats’ 1 Rid of the world’s injustice, and his pain, 2 He rests at last beneath God’s veil of blue: 3 Taken from life when life and love were new 4 The youngest of the martyrs here is lain, 5 Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain. 6 No cypress shades his grave, no funeral yew, 7 But gentle violets weeping with the dew 8 Weave on his bones an ever-blossoming chain. 9 O proudest heart that broke for misery! 10 O sweetest lips since those of Mitylene! 11 O poet-painter of our English Land! 12 Thy name was writ in water – it shall stand: 13 And tears like mine will keep thy memory green, 14 As Isabella did her Basil-tree.

‘Endymion’ 1 The apple trees are hung with gold, 2 And birds are loud in Arcady, 3 The sheep lie bleating in the fold, 4 The wild goat runs across the wold, 5 But yesterday his love he told, 6 I know he will come back to me. 7 O rising moon! O Lady moon! 8 Be you my lover’s sentinel, 9 You cannot choose but know him well, 10 For he is shod with purple shoon, 11 You cannot choose but know my love, 12 For he a shepherd’s crook doth bear, 13 And he is soft as any dove, 14 And brown and curly is his hair. 15 The turtle now has ceased to call 16 Upon her crimson-footed groom, 156



Appendix 7: Oscar Wilde, ‘The Grave of Keats’, ‘Endymion’ and ‘The Garden of Eros’

17 The grey wolf prowls about the stall, 18 The lily’s singing seneschal 19 Sleeps in the lily-bell, and all 20 The violet hills are lost in gloom. 21 O risen moon! O holy moon! 22 Stand on the top of Helice, 23 And if my own true love you see, 24 Ah! if you see the purple shoon, 25 The hazel crook, the lad’s brown hair, 26 The goat-skin wrapped about his arm, 27 Tell him that I am waiting where 28 The rushlight glimmers in the Farm. 29 The falling dew is cold and chill, 30 And no bird sings in Arcady, 31 The little fauns have left the hill, 32 Even the tired daffodil 33 Has closed its gilded doors, and still 34 My lover comes not back to me. 35 False moon! False moon! O waning moon! 36 Where is my own true lover gone, 37 Where are the lips vermilion, 38 The shepherd’s crook, the purple shoon? 39 Why spread that silver pavilion, 40 Why wear that veil of drifting mist? 41 Ah! thou hast young Endymion, 42 Thou hast the lips that should be kissed!

‘The Garden of Eros’ 1 It is full summer now, the heart of June, 2 Not yet the sunburnt reapers are astir 3 Upon the upland meadow where too soon 4 Rich autumn time, the season’s usurer, 5 Will lend his hoarded gold to all the trees, 6 And see his treasure scattered by the wild and spendthrift breeze. 7 Too soon indeed! yet here the daffodil, 8 That love-child of the Spring, has lingered on 9 To vex the rose with jealousy, and still 10 The harebell spreads her azure pavilion, 11 And like a strayed and wandering reveller 12 Abandoned of its brothers, whom long since June’s messenger 13 The missel-thrush has frighted from the glade, 14 One pale narcissus loiters fearfully 15 Close to a shadowy nook, where half afraid 16 Of their own loveliness some violets lie



Appendix 7 157

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Appendix 7

19 Which should be trodden by Persephone 20 When wearied of the flowerless fields of Dis! 21 Or danced on by the lads of Arcady! 22 The hidden secret of eternal bliss 23 Known to the Grecian here a man might find, 24 Ah! you and I may find it now if Love and Sleep be kind. 25 There are the flowers which mourning Herakles 26 Strewed on the tomb of Hylas, columbine, 27 Its white doves all a-flutter where the breeze 28 Kissed them too harshly, the small celandine, 29 That yellow-kirtled chorister of eve, 30 And lilac lady’s-smock, – but let them bloom alone, and leave 31 Yon spirèd hollyhock red-crocketed 32 To sway its silent chimes, else must the bee, 33 Its little bellringer, go seek instead 34 Some other pleasaunce; the anemone 35 That weeps at daybreak, like a silly girl 36 Before her love, and hardly lets the butterflies unfurl 37 Their painted wings beside it, – bid it pine 38 In pale virginity; the winter snow 39 Will suit it better than those lips of thine 40 Whose fires would but scorch it, rather go 41 And pluck that amorous flower which blooms alone, 42 Fed by the pander wind with dust of kisses not its own. 43 The trumpet-mouths of red convolvulus 44 So dear to maidens, creamy meadow-sweet 45 Whiter than Juno’s throat and odorous 46 As all Arabia, hyacinths the feet 47 Of Huntress Dian would be loth to mar 48 For any dappled fawn, – pluck these, and those fond flowers which are 49 Fairer than what Queen Venus trod upon 50 Beneath the pines of Ida, eucharis, 51 That morning star which does not dread the sun, 52 And budding marjoram which but to kiss 53 Would sweeten Cytheræa’s lips and make 54 Adonis jealous, – these for thy head, – and for thy girdle take 55 Yon curving spray of purple clematis 56 Whose gorgeous dye outflames the Tyrian King, 57 And foxgloves with their nodding chalices, 58 But that one narciss which the startled Spring 59 Let from her kirtle fall when first she heard 60 In her own woods the wild tempestuous song of summer’s bird,



17 That will not look the gold sun in the face 18 For fear of too much splendour, – ah! methinks it is a place

61 Ah! leave it for a subtle memory 62 Of those sweet tremulous days of rain and sun, 63 When April laughed between her tears to see 64 The early primrose with shy footsteps run 65 From the gnarled oak-tree roots till all the wold, 66 Spite of its brown and trampled leaves, grew bright with shimmering gold. 67 Nay, pluck it too, it is not half so sweet 68 As thou thyself, my soul’s idolatry! 69 And when thou art a-wearied at thy feet 70 Shall oxlips weave their brightest tapestry, 71 For thee the woodbine shall forget its pride 72 And veil its tangled whorls, and thou shalt walk on daisies pied. 73 And I will cut a reed by yonder spring 74 And make the wood-gods jealous, and old Pan 75 Wonder what young intruder dares to sing 76 In these still haunts, where never foot of man 77 Should tread at evening, lest he chance to spy 78 The marble limbs of Artemis and all her company. 79 And I will tell thee why the jacinth wears 80 Such dread embroidery of dolorous moan, 81 And why the hapless nightingale forbears 82 To sing her song at noon, but weeps alone 83 When the fleet swallow sleeps, and rich men feast, 84 And why the laurel trembles when she sees the lightening east. 85 And I will sing how sad Proserpina 86 Unto a grave and gloomy Lord was wed, 87 And lure the silver-breasted Helena 88 Back from the lotus meadows of the dead, 89 So shalt thou see that awful loveliness 90 For which two mighty Hosts met fearfully in war’s abyss! 91 And then I ‘ll pipe to thee that Grecian tale 92 How Cynthia loves the lad Endymion, 93 And hidden in a grey and misty veil 94 Hies to the cliffs of Latmos once the Sun 95 Leaps from his ocean bed in fruitless chase 96 Of those pale flying feet which fade away in his embrace. 97 And if my flute can breathe sweet melody, 98 We may behold Her face who long ago 99 Dwelt among men by the Ægean sea, 100 And whose sad house with pillaged portico 101 And friezeless wall and columns toppled down 102 Looms o’er the ruins of that fair and violet-cinctured town. 103 Spirit of Beauty! tarry still awhile, 104 They are not dead, thine ancient votaries,



Appendix 7 159

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109 Who for thy sake would give their manlihood 110 And consecrate their being, I at least 111 Have done so, made thy lips my daily food, 112 And in thy temples found a goodlier feast 113 Than this starved age can give me, spite of all 114 Its new-found creeds so sceptical and so dogmatical. 115 Here not Cephissos, not Ilissos flows, 116 The woods of white Colonos are not here, 117 On our bleak hills the olive never blows, 118 No simple priest conducts his lowing steer 119 Up the steep marble way, nor through the town 120 Do laughing maidens bear to thee the crocus-flowered gown. 121 Yet tarry! for the boy who loved thee best, 122 Whose very name should be a memory 123 To make thee linger, sleeps in silent rest 124 Beneath the Roman walls, and melody 125 Still mourns her sweetest lyre, none can play 126 The lute of Adonais, with his lips Song passed away. 127 Nay, when Keats died the Muses still had left 128 One silver voice to sing his threnody, 129 But ah! too soon of it we were bereft 130 When on that riven night and stormy sea 131 Panthea claimed her singer as her own, 132 And slew the mouth that praised her; since which time we walk alone, 133 Save for that fiery heart, that morning star 134 Of re-arisen England, whose clear eye 135 Saw from our tottering throne and waste of war 136 The grand Greek limbs of young Democracy 137 Rise mightily like Hesperus and bring 138 The great Republic! him at least thy love hath taught to sing, 139 And he hath been with thee at Thessaly, 140 And seen white Atalanta fleet of foot 141 In passionless and fierce virginity 142 Hunting the tuskèd boar, his honied lute 143 Hath pierced the cavern of the hollow hill, 144 And Venus laughs to know one knee will bow before her still. 145 And he hath kissed the lips of Proserpine, 146 And sung the Galilæan’s requiem,



105 Some few there are to whom thy radiant smile 106 Is better than a thousand victories, 107 Though all the nobly slain of Waterloo 108 Rise up in wrath against them! tarry still, there are a few

Appendix 7 161

151 Spirit of Beauty! tarry with us still, 152 It is not quenched the torch of poesy, 153 The star that shook above the Eastern hill 154 Holds unassailed its argent armoury 155 From all the gathering gloom and fretful fight – 156 O tarry with us still! for through the long and common night, 157 Morris, our sweet and simple Chaucer’s child, 158 Dear heritor of Spenser’s tuneful reed, 159 With soft and sylvan pipe has oft beguiled 160 The weary soul of man in troublous need, 161 And from the far and flowerless fields of ice 162 Has brought fair flowers to make an earthly paradise. 163 We know them all, Gudrun the strong men’s bride, 164 Aslaug and Olafson we know them all, 165 How giant Grettir fought and Sigurd died, 166 And what enchantment held the king in thrall 167 When lonely Brynhild wrestled with the powers 168 That war against all passion, ah! how oft through summer hours, 169 Long listless summer hours when the noon 170 Being enamoured of a damask rose 171 Forgets to journey westward, till the moon 172 The pale usurper of its tribute grows 173 From a thin sickle to a silver shield 174 And chides its loitering car – how oft, in some cool grassy field 175 Far from the cricket-ground and noisy eight, 176 At Bagley, where the rustling bluebells come 177 Almost before the blackbird finds a mate 178 And overstay the swallow, and the hum 179 Of many murmuring bees flits through the leaves, 180 Have I lain poring on the dreamy tales his fancy weaves, 181 And through their unreal woes and mimic pain 182 Wept for myself, and so was purified, 183 And in their simple mirth grew glad again; 184 For as I sailed upon that pictured tide 185 The strength and splendour of the storm was mine 186 Without the storm’s red ruin, for the singer is divine, 187 The little laugh of water falling down 188 Is not so musical, the clammy gold



147 That wounded forehead dashed with blood and wine 148 He hath discrowned, the Ancient Gods in him 149 Have found their last, most ardent worshipper, 150 And the new Sign grows grey and dim before its conqueror.

162

Appendix 7

193 Spirit of Beauty, tarry yet awhile! 194 Although the cheating merchants of the mart 195 With iron roads profane our lovely isle, 196 And break on whirling wheels the limbs of Art, 197 Ay! though the crowded factories beget 198 The blindworm Ignorance that slays the soul, O tarry yet! 199 For One at least there is, – He bears his name 200 From Dante and the seraph Gabriel, – 201 Whose double laurels burn with deathless flame 202 To light thine altar; He too loves thee well, 203 Who saw old Merlin lured in Vivien’s snare, 204 And the white feet of angels coming down the golden stair, 205 Loves thee so well, that all the World for him 206 A gorgeous-coloured vestiture must wear, 207 And Sorrow take a purple diadem, 208 Or else be no more Sorrow, and Despair 209 Gild its own thorns, and Pain, like Adon, be 210 Even in anguish beautiful; – such is the empery 211 Which Painters hold, and such the heritage 212 This gentle solemn Spirit doth possess, 213 Being a better mirror of his age 214 In all his pity, love, and weariness, 215 Than those who can but copy common things, 216 And leave the Soul unpainted with its mighty questionings. 217 But they are few, and all romance has flown, 218 And men can prophesy about the sun, 219 And lecture on his arrows – how, alone, 220 Through a waste void the soulless atoms run, 221 How from each tree its weeping nymph has fled, 222 And that no more ‘mid English reeds a Naïad shows her head. 223 Methinks these new Actæons boast too soon 224 That they have spied on beauty; what if we 225 Have analysed the rainbow, robbed the moon 226 Of her most ancient, chastest mystery, 227 Shall I, the last Endymion, lose all hope 228 Because rude eyes peer at my mistress through a telescope! 229 What profit if this scientific age 230 Burst through our gates with all its retinue 231 Of modern miracles! Can it assuage 232 One lover’s breaking heart? what can it do



189 Close hoarded in the tiny waxen town 190 Has less of sweetness in it, and the old 191 Half-withered reeds that waved in Arcady 192 Touched by his lips break forth again to fresher harmony.

Appendix 7 163

235 Returns in horrid cycle, and the earth 236 Hath borne again a noisy progeny 237 Of ignorant Titans, whose ungodly birth 238 Hurls them against the august hierarchy 239 Which sat upon Olympus, to the Dust 240 They have appealed, and to that barren arbiter they must 241 Repair for judgment, let them, if they can, 242 From Natural Warfare and insensate Chance, 243 Create the new Ideal rule for man! 244 Methinks that was not my inheritance; 245 For I was nurtured otherwise, my soul 246 Passes from higher heights of life to a more supreme goal. 247 Lo! while we spake the earth did turn away 248 Her visage from the God, and Hecate’s boat 249 Rose silver-laden, till the jealous day 250 Blew all its torches out: I did not note 251 The waning hours, to young Endymions 252 Time’s palsied fingers count in vain his rosary of suns! 253 Mark how the yellow iris wearily 254 Leans back its throat, as though it would be kissed 255 By its false chamberer, the dragon-fly, 256 Who, like a blue vein on a girl’s white wrist, 257 Sleeps on that snowy primrose of the night, 258 Which ‘gins to flush with crimson shame, and die beneath the light. 259 Come let us go, against the pallid shield 260 Of the wan sky the almond blossoms gleam, 261 The corncrake nested in the unmown field 262 Answers its mate, across the misty stream 263 On fitful wing the startled curlews fly, 264 And in his sedgy bed the lark, for joy that Day is nigh, 265 Scatters the pearlèd dew from off the grass, 266 In tremulous ecstasy to greet the sun, 267 Who soon in gilded panoply will pass 268 Forth from yon orange-curtained pavilion 269 Hung in the burning east, see, the red rim 270 O’ertops the expectant hills! it is the God! for love of him 271 Already the shrill lark is out of sight, 272 Flooding with waves of song this silent dell, – 273 Ah! there is something more in that bird’s flight 274 Than could be tested in a crucible! – 275 But the air freshens, let us go, why soon 276 The woodmen will be here; how we have lived this night of June!



233 To make one life more beautiful, one day 234 More godlike in its period? but now the Age of Clay

1 Who, then, was Cestius, 2 And what is he to me? – 3 Amid thick thoughts and memories multitudinous 4 One thought alone brings he. 5 I can recall no word 6 Of anything he did; 7 For me he is a man who died and was interred 8 To leave a pyramid 9 Whose purpose was exprest 10 Not with its first design, 11 Nor till, far down in Time, beside it found their rest 12 Two countrymen of mine. 13 Cestius in life, maybe, 14 Slew, breathed out threatening; 15 I know not. This I know: in death all silently 16 He does a finer thing, 17 In beckoning pilgrim feet 18 With marble finger high 19 To where, by shadowy wall and history-haunted street, 20 Those matchless singers lie . . . . 21 – Say, then, he lived and died 22 That stones which bear his name 23 Should mark, through Time, where two immortal Shades abide; 24 It is an ample fame.

164



Appendix 8: Thomas Hardy, ‘At the Pyramid of Cestius Near the Graves of Shelley and Keats’

1 Wrestling, we cannot let our angels go 2 Until perforce they bless us; sunward then 3 Wearing the rose of youth they pass our ken 4 Adown their weltering way in Eve’s warm glow. 5 Stay thou, even thou, and bless us! yea that so 6 Thy sinuous loins engirt about with truth 7 Fulfil the broad-thewed promise of their youth; 8 Nay stay; nor leave us till thy name we know. 9 Prevailing, thou art gone; and now at gaze, 10 We strain sad eyes into the crimsoning haze, 11 Even to the eternal city of the sun. 12 Foredoomed to go, farewell! albeit lies 13 Down meads of memory till the Day be done 14 Thy path predestined through the centuries.

165



Appendix 9: Thomas Hall Caine, ‘To OMB’

1 The harsh King – Winter – sat upon the hills, 2 And reigned and ruled the earth right royally. 3 He locked the rivers, lakes, and all the rills – 4 ‘I am no puny, maudlin king’, quoth he, 5 ‘But a stern monarch, born to rule, and reign; 6 And I’ll show my power to the end. 7 The Summer’s flowery retinue I’ve slain, 8 And taken the bold free North Wind for my friend.’ 9 ‘Spring, Summer, Autumn – feeble queens they were, 10 With their vast troops of flowers, birds and bees, 11 Soft winds, that made the long green grasses stir – 12 They lost their own identity in things like these! 13 I scorn them all! nay, I defy them all! 14 And none can wrest the sceptre from my hand. 15 And trusty North Wind answers to my call, 16 And breathes his icy breath upon the land.’ 17 The Siren – South Wind – listening the while, 18 Now floated airily across the lea. 19 ‘O King!’ she cried, with tender tone and smile, 20 ‘I come to do all homage unto thee. 21 In all the sunny region, whence I came, 22 I find none like thee, King, so brave and grand! 23 Thine is a well-deserved, unrivalled fame; 24 I kiss, in awe, dear King, thy cold white hand.’ 25 Her words were pleasing, and most fair her face, 26 He listened rapt to her soft-whispered praise. 27 She nestled nearer, in her Siren grace. 28 ‘Dear King’, she said, ‘henceforth my voice shall raise 29 But songs of thy unrivalled splendour! Lo! 30 How white thy brow is! How thy garments shine! 31 I tremble ‘neath thy beaming glance, for oh, 32 Thy wondrous beauty makes thee seem divine.’ 33 The vain King listened, in a trance of bliss, 34 To this most sweet-voiced Siren from the South. 35 She nestled close, and pressed a lingering kiss 166



Appendix 10: Ella Wheeler Wilcox, ‘The King and the Siren’

36 Upon the stern white pallor of his mouth. 37 She hung upon his breast, she pressed his cheek, 38 And he was nothing loath to hold her there, 39 While she such tender, loving words did speak, 40 And combed his white locks with her fingers fair. 41 And so she bound him, in her Siren wiles, 42 And stole his strength, with every kiss she gave, 43 And stabbed him through and through, with tender smiles, 44 And with her loving words, she dug his grave; 45 And then she left him, old, and weak, and blind, 46 And unlocked all the rivers, lakes, and rills, 47 While the queen Spring, with her whole troop, behind, 48 Of flowers, and birds, and bees, came o’er the hills.


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Appendix 10

1 Today I found the right fruit for my prime, 2 not orange, not tangelo, and not lime, 3 nor moon-like globes of grapefruit that now hang 4 outside our bedroom, nor tart lemon’s tang 5 (though last year full of bile and self-defeat 6 I wanted to believe no life was sweet) 7 nor the tangible sunshine of the tangerine, 8 and no incongruous citrus ever seen 9 at greengrocers’ in Newcastle or Leeds 10 mis-spelt by the spuds and mud-caked swedes, 11 a fruit an older poet might substitute 12 for the grape John Keats thought fit to be Joy’s fruit, 13 when, two years before he died, he tried to write 14 how Melancholy dwelled inside Delight, 15 and if he’d known the citrus that I mean 16 that’s not orange, lemon, lime or tangerine, 17 I’m pretty sure that Keats, though he had heard 18 ‘of candied apple, quince and plum and gourd’ 19 instead of ‘grape against the palate fine’ 20 would have, if he’d known it, plumped for mine, 21 this Eastern citrus scarcely cherry size 22 he’d bite just once and then apostrophize 23 and pen one stanza how the fruit had all 24 the qualities of fruit before the Fall, 25 but in the next few lines be forced to write 26 how Eve’s apple tasted at the second bite, 27 and if John Keats had only lived to be, 28 because of extra years, in need like me, 29 at 42 he’d help me celebrate 30 that Micanopy kumquat that I ate 31 whole, straight off the tree, sweet pulp and sour skin – 32 or was it sweet outside, and sour within? 33 For however many kumquats that I eat 34 I’m not sure if it’s flesh or rind that’s sweet, 35 and being a man of doubt at life’s mid-way 36 I’d offer Keats some kumquats and I’d say: 37 You’ll find that one part’s sweet and one part’s tart: 38 say where the sweetness or the sourness start. 168



Appendix 11: Tony Harrison, ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’

39 I find I can’t, as if one couldn’t say 40 exactly where the night became the day, 41 which makes for me the kumquat taken whole 42 best fruit, and metaphor, to fit the soul 43 of one in Florida at 42 with Keats 44 crunching kumquats, thinking, as he eats 45 the flesh, the juice, the pith, the pips, the peel, 46 that this is how a full life ought to feel, 47 its perishable relish prick the tongue, 48 when the man who savours life’s no longer young, 49 the fruits that were his futures far behind. 50 Then it’s the kumquat fruit expresses best 51 how days have darkness round them like a rind, 52 life has a skin of death that keeps its zest. 53 History, a life, the heart, the brain 54 flow to the taste buds and flow back again. 55 That decade or more past Keats’s span 56 makes me an older not a wiser man, 57 who knows that it’s too late for dying young, 58 but since youth leaves some sweetness unsung, 59 he’s granted days and kumquats to express 60 Man’s Being ripened by his Nothingness. 61 And it isn’t just the gap of sixteen years, 62 a bigger crop of terrors, hopes and fears, 63 but a century of history on this earth 64 between John Keats’s death and my own birth – 65 years like an open crater, gory, grim, 66 with bloody bubbles leering at the rim; 67 a thing no bigger than an urn explodes 68 and ravishes all silence, and all odes, 69 Flora asphyxiated by foul air 70 unknown to either Keats or Lemprière, 71 dehydrated Naiads, Dryad amputees 72 dragging themselves through slagscapes with no trees, 73 a shirt of Nessus fire that gnaws and eats 74 children half the age of dying Keats . . . 75 Now were you twenty-five or six years old 76 when that fevered brow at last grew cold? 77 I’ve got no books to hand to check the dates. 78 My grudging but glad spirit celebrates 79 that all I’ve got to hand’s the kumquat, John, 80 the fruit I’d love to have your verdict on, 81 but dead men don’t eat kumquats, or drink wine, 82 they shiver in the arms of Proserpine, 83 not warm in bed beside their Fanny Brawne, 84 nor watch her pick ripe grapefruit in the dawn


169


Appendix 11

Appendix 11

85 as I did, waking, when I saw her twist, 86 with one deft movement of a sunburnt wrist, 87 the moon that feebly lit our last night’s walk 88 past alligator swampland, off its stalk. 89 I thought of moon-juice juleps when I saw, 90 as if I’d never seen the moon before, 91 the planet glow among the fruit, and its pale light 92 make each citrus on the tree its satellite. 93 Each evening when I reach to draw the blind 94 stars seem the light zest squeezed through night’s black rind; 95 the night’s peeled fruit the sun, juiced of its rays, 96 first stains, then streaks, then floods the world with days, 97 days, when the very sunlight made me weep, 98 days, spent like the nights in deep, drugged sleep, 99 days in Newcastle by my daughter’s bed, 100 wondering if she, or I, weren’t better dead, 101 days in Leeds, grey days, my first dark suit, 102 my mother’s wreaths stacked next to Christmas fruit, 103 and days, like this in Micanopy. Days! 104 As strong sun burns away the dawn’s grey haze 105 I pick a kumquat and the branches spray 106 cold dew in my face to start the day. 107 The dawn’s molasses make the citrus gleam 108 still in the orchards of the groves of dream. 109 The limes, like Galway after weeks of rain, 110 glow with a greenness that is close to pain, 111 the dew-cooled surfaces of fruit that spent 112 all last night flaming in the firmanent. 113 The new day dawns. O days! My spirit greets 114 the kumquat with the spirit of John Keats. 115 O kumquat, comfort for not dying young, 116 both sweet and bitter, bless the poet’s tongue! 117 I burst the whole fruit chilled my morning dew 118 against my palate. Fine, for 42! 119 I search for buzzards as the air grows clear 120 and see them ride fresh thermals overhead. 121 Their bleak cries were the first sound I could hear 122 when I stepped at the start of sunrise out of doors, 123 and a noise like last night’s bedsprings on our bed 124 from Mr Fowler sharpening farmers’ saws.



170

Introduction 1. Letter to George and Georgiana Keats dated 18 February 1819. All references to Keats’s letters are taken from Letters of John Keats, edited by Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975), and will be dated in the text. 2. Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). 3. Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998). 4. Andrew Motion, Keats (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), p. xix. 5. ‘Continual Allegory’ is the title of the second chapter in William Henry Marquess’s Lives of the Poet: The First Century of Keats Biography (University Park: Pennsylvannia State UP, 1985), p. 73. 6. Jack Stillinger, ‘The “Story” of Keats’, in The Cambridge Companion to Keats, edited by Susan J. Wolfson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), pp. 246–60 (p. 253). 7. John Barnard, ‘Keats’s Letters’, in The Cambridge Companion to Keats, edited by Susan J. Wolfson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), pp. 120–34 (p. 123). 8. Andrew Bennett, Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), p. 1. 9. Garrett Stewart, ‘Keats and Language’, in The Cambridge Companion to Keats, edited by Susan J. Wolfson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), pp. 135–51 (p. 135). 10. Lynne Pearce, Woman/Image/Text: Readings in Pre-Raphaelite Art and Literature (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 28. 11. The edition of Shelley’s poetry referred to throughout is Shelley: Poetical Works, edited by Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971). Future references will appear in the text. 12. Hunt employs this term to describe his first experience of Keats’s poetry (see Chapter 2, p. 44). 13. Quoted in Marquess, p. 38. 14. Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1999), p. 185. 15. See Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (Penguin: London, 1991) for contextual background on consumption in the nineteenth century, and Hermione de Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats (New York: Oxford UP, 1991) for Keats’s relation to the discourse of disease. 16. Jennifer Davis Michael, ‘Pectoriloquy: The Narrative of Consumption in the Letters of John Keats’, European Romantic Review 6 (1996), 38–56 171



Notes

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

Notes

(pp. 48, 53). Michael suggests that as Keats’s poetic output ceased, he left ‘only pectoriloquy, the potently signifying speech of the body’ that is voiced in his letters (p. 53). The auto-cannibalism of his vital organs can be read as ‘an embodied and interpretable text’ (p. 46). Denise Gigante similarly identifies a relationship between textuality and the consumptive body: ‘Keats is virtually unique among poets in the fact that the details of his physical disintegration, the “ghastly wasting-away of his body and extremities” documented in painful detail in the journal letters of Severn, form an appendix (if not more vital appendage) to his literary corpus’. See ‘Keats’s Nausea’, Studies in Romanticism, 40 (2001), 481–510 (p. 508). Andrew Epstein, ‘ “Flowers that Mock the Corse Beneath”: Shelley’s Adonais, Keats, and Poetic Influence’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 48 (1999), 90–128 (p. 111). For a more detailed discussion of Bakhtin’s view of the complementary Other, see Deborah J. Haynes, Bakhtin and the Visual Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995). See Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock, ‘Woman as Sign in Pre-Raphaelite Literature: A Study of the Representation of Elizabeth Siddall’, Art History, 7 (1984), 206–27. For a discussion of the gendering of TB, see Susan J. Wolfson, ‘Feminizing Keats’, in Critical Essays on John Keats, edited by Hermione De Almeida (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), pp. 317–56. Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 171–86 (p. 171). See also Margaret Homans, ‘Keats Reading Women, Women Reading Keats’, Studies in Romanticism, 29 (1990), 341–72. Anne K. Mellor, ‘Keats and the Complexities of Gender’, in The Cambridge Companion to Keats, edited by Susan J. Wolfson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), pp. 214–29. Margaret Homans, ‘Amy Lowell’s Keats: Reading Straight, Writing Lesbian’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 14 (2001), 319–51 (p. 329); James Najarian, Victorian Keats: Manliness, Sexuality, and Desire (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). Lives of the Great Romantics II: Keats, Coleridge and Scott by their Contemporaries: Keats, edited by Jennifer Wallace (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1997), p. xviii. Toril Moi, ‘Patriarchal Thought and the Drive for Knowledge’, in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, edited by Teresa Breman (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 189–205. See also Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, edited by Toil Moi (London: Methuen, 1985) and the chapter entitled ‘Self and Others’ in Lois McNay, Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and the Self (Cornwall: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 157–91. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3 vols (London: Lane, 1979), I. For example, George H. Ford examines the Romantic poet’s influence on nineteenth-century writers at the expense of pictorial renderings. See Keats and the Victorians: A Study of His Influence and Rise to Fame



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1821–1895 (London: Archon Books, 1962). Similarly, Marquess devotes only a single passage to the Pre-Raphaelites in his study of Keats’s afterlife. Admittedly, Lives of the Poet focuses on biography, but even Grant F. Scott’s book on Keats as an ekphrastic poet limits any discussion of paintings by Millais and Hunt to a few paragraphs. See the chapter entitled ‘Words into Pictures’, in The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts (London: New England UP, 1994), pp. 68–95. 28. Quoted in Cedric Watts, A Preface to Keats (London: Longman, 1985), p. 66. 29. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia UP, 1985). 30. Grant F. Scott, ‘Language Strange: A Visual History of Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci” ’, Studies in Romanticism, 38 (1999), 503–35 (p. 532).

1

Keats’s posthumous life of elegy

1. Jeffrey C. Robinson, Reception and Poetics in Keats: ‘My Ended Poet’ (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), p. 52. 2. Robinson’s appendix consists of over thirty elegies to Keats. Whilst the focus of this chapter is on nineteenth-century tributes, Robinson’s survey attests to the continuing compulsion to elegise Keats. 3. Letter to Dante Gabriel Rossetti dated 26 March 1880 (Caine’s reference to Keats as a ‘perennial’ also appears in this letter). This letter and Caine’s sonnet to ‘John Keats’ are part of an extensive correspondence that will be discussed at greater length in Chapter 3 (see note 16). 4. Andrew Epstein, ‘ “Flowers that Mock the Corse Beneath”: Shelley’s Adonais, Keats, and Poetic Influence’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 48 (1999), 90–128 (p. 128). 5. If we accept Denise Gigante’s portrait of Keats as a poetic ‘ravener’ who succumbed to a ‘fiercely carnivorous consumption’, it can be argued that ‘Adonais’ continues a process initiated by the subject. See ‘Keats’s Nausea’, Studies in Romanticism, 40 (2001), 481–510 (pp. 483–4). 6. Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (London: John Hopkins UP, 1985), p. 36. 7. Michael O’Neill, ‘Adonais and Poetic Power’, The Wordsworth Circle, 35 (Spring 2004), 50–7 (p. 51). 8. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (London: Yale UP, 1979), p. 6. 9. Letter to John and Maria Gisbourne dated 5 June 1821. The phrase ‘piece of art’ is also from this source and emphasised in the original. In a letter to Claire Claremont, dated 8 June 1821, Shelley stresses that ‘Adonais’ is ‘better than anything that I have yet written’. The edition of Shelley’s letters referred to throughout this chapter is The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Roger Ingpen, 10 vols (London: Ernest



Notes

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

Notes

Benn, 1965), X. Subsequent references to Shelley’s letters will be dated in the text. For a discussion of the rivalry between Shelley and Keats, see James A. W. Heffernan, ‘“Adonais”: Shelley’s Consumption of Keats’, Studies in Romanticism, 23 (1984), 295–315 (pp. 299–300). The edition of Shelley’s poetry referred to throughout this chapter is Shelley: Poetical Works, edited by Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971). All subsequent references will appear in the text. Susan J. Wolfson, ‘Keats enters history: Autopsy, Adonais, and the fame of Keats’, in Keats and History, edited by Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), pp. 17–45 (p. 32). Shelley’s Preface to ‘Adonais’ in W. M. Rossetti, The Adonais of Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), p. 70. All subsequent references to the Preface are from this edition. See Rachel Falconer, Orpheus Dis(re)Membered: Milton and the Myth of the Poet-Hero (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996). For a full account of Shelley versus Southey, see Heffernan, pp. 301–4. Richard Monckton Milnes, Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats, 2 vols (London: Moxon, 1848). For further details on early biographies of Keats, see Lives of the Great Romantics II: Keats, Coleridge and Scott by their Contemporaries: Keats, edited by Jennifer Wallace (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1997). According to Robinson, Alice Meynell’s description of Keats as ‘my ended poet’ encapsulates this Victorian archetype. W. G. T., ‘The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley’, Metropolitan Magazine, 14 (September 1835), 53–66. Quoted in Wolfson, p. 19. Shelley refers to Keats’s ‘penetrable’ nature in the Preface (p. 70). Sacks, The English Elegy, p. 5. See pp. 4–8 for an in-depth discussion of ‘the dramatic relation between loss and figuration’ in the stories of Apollo and Daphne, Pan and Syrinx (p. 4). Certain images in ‘Adonais’, such as ‘his light limbs’ (92), suggest an Orphic dismemberment that not only recalls the attempted rapes of both Daphne and Syrinx, but more specifically relates to the violence of the Ciconian women – most notably, the rapelike imagery of their phallic missiles, the silencing of their victim’s ‘lifeless tongue’ and the dispersal of the male form: ‘His limbs lie scattered in various places.’ See Mark P. O. Morford and Robert J. Lenardon, Classical Mythology, 3rd edn (New York and London: Longman, 1985), p. 286. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by A. D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986), pp. 234–41, and James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: Studies in the History of Oriental Religion: Adonis, Attis, Osiris, 12 vols, 3rd edn (London: Macmillan, 1941), I. Milton can only summon ‘mild whispers’ and ‘wanton winds’ in ‘Lycidas’, whereas Shelley’s voice captures the primal power of Nature. Laurence Coupe, Myth (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 25. Frazer’s heroic challenger must pluck the golden bough, the repository of Jupiter’s power (Myth, p. 25).



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175

24. Richard Holmes, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (London: Harper Collins, 1985), p. 197. 25. See Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism: Second Series (London: Macmillan, 1892), p. 252. 26. See Milnes, Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, pp. 105–6. Framed together, John Linton Chapman’s paintings, ‘Tomb of Shelley’ and ‘Tomb of Keats’ (both 1862), similarly join the poets in death. 27. Ian Jack and Robert Inglesfield speculate that ‘Popularity’ was written between 1853 and 1855 even though it was not published until 1863 (in Dramatic Lyrics). The edition referred to is The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, edited by Ian Jack and Robert Inglesfield, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), V, pp. 434–40. All subsequent references to this poem will appear in the text. 28. Keats and the Victorians: A Study of His Influence and Rise to Fame, 1821–1895 (London: Archon Books, 1962), p. 10. 29. For further details of Browning’s enthusiasm for Keats, see Yas Shen ‘Robert Browning and a Letter of John Keats’, Studies in Browning and his Circle, 6 (1978), 32–8 (pp. 32–3). 30. Stephen Gurney contests this position by identifying deep and profound resonances between the poets. See ‘Between Two Worlds: Keats’s “Hyperion” and Browning’s “Saul” ’, Studies in Browning and his Circle, 8 (1980), 57–74. For another perspective on the literary affinity between Keats and Browning, see Sung Ryol Kim, ‘Browning’s Vision of Keats: “Cleon” and the “Mansion of Many Apartments” Letter’, Victorian Poetry, 34 (1996), 223–32. 31. In terms of length, ‘Adonais’ consists of fifty-five stanzas while ‘Popularity’ only runs to thirteen; in terms of the number of lines, Shelley’s elegy is almost eight times longer than that of Browning. 32. Celeste M. Schenck, ‘Feminism and Deconstruction: Re-Constructing the Elegy’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 5 (1986), 13–27 (p. 15). 33. ‘On Keats’, 11–13. The edition referred to is The Poetical Works of Christina Rossetti, edited by W. M. Rossetti (London: Macmillan, 1928), p. 291. Subsequent references to this poem will appear in the text. 34. Frances Thomas, Christina Rossetti: A Biography (London: Virago, 1992), p. 55. 35. Lona Mosk Packer, Christina Rossetti (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1963), p. 14. 36. Barbara Fass, ‘Christina Rossetti and St Agnes’ Eve’, Victorian Poetry, 14 (1976), 33–46 (p. 35). 37. Antony H. Harrison, Christina Rossetti in Context (Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1988), p. 48. 38. David Latham, ‘Haunted Texts: The Invention of Pre-Raphaelite Studies’, in Haunted Texts: Studies in Pre-Raphaelitism, edited by David Latham (Toronto: Toronto UP, 2003), pp. 1–33 (p. 22). 39. ‘On Keats’s Grave’ appeared in an early manuscript that included poems dated from December 1868 to April 1870.



Notes

Notes

40. The flowers that grew over Keats’s grave invariably prompted a tender remembrance of the poet. The ‘violets and daisies’ (p. 70) that Shelley notes in the Preface to ‘Adonais’ are described as ‘A light of laughing flowers along the grass’ in the elegy itself (441). Unlike Shelley, however, the flora and fauna in Meynell’s elegy does not indicate the prowess of the elegist, but recalls the connection Keats made between flowers, fecundity and poetic conception: A rosy sanctuary will I dress With the wreathed trellis of a working brain, With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign, Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same. (‘Ode to Psyche’, 59–63) 41. Although Rossetti’s interest in Keats emerged in the 1840s, it was not until 1881, a year before his death, that this elegy was published. 42. To generate each separate fricative sound, the tongue must perform a complete velic closure to trap air in the mouth, thereby rendering the articulation of Rossetti’s half-line linguistically strenuous. 43. Forming a further connection between Rossetti and his elegiac predecessors, Shelley also introduces the dreaded river of forgetfulness in ‘Adonais’. Plutarch called Dionysus ‘son of Lethe’, referring to his association with wine; thus, the role that Shelley selects to manage or repress Keats’s rebirth insidiously impedes the subject through an allusion to his own poetic fears (Robert Graves, The Greek Myths [London: Penguin, 1992], p. 57). Epstein argues that Keats’s aesthetic is turned against him in ‘Adonais’. The subject’s indeterminacy enables Shelley to consign him to ‘an endless paralysis of sleep’, a ‘Cold Pastoral’ of silence and inertia (‘Flowers that Mock’, p. 119). 44. Keats requested that the inscription on his gravestone read: ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’ However, it was ‘embellished by Charles Brown so as to concur with Shelley that Keats’s death was hastened by enemies’, and subsequently read: ‘This grave contains all that was Mortal, of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET Who, on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone.’ Brown later considered the alteration to be a ‘sort of profanation’, but he was not alone in his desire to supplement the terse line that Keats proposed. Some fifty-five years after Keats’s death, a medallion by John Warrington Wood (based on a medallion plaque by Giuseppe Girometti) and a poem engraved by Major-General Sir Vincent Eyre were unveiled beside the Romantic poet’s tomb. The first line of verse questions the epitaph it is intended to complement: ‘Keats! if thy cherished name be “writ in water” ’ (my emphasis). All references to Brown are quoted in Robert Woof and Stephen Hebron, John Keats (Grasmere: Wordsworth Trust, 1995), p. 167. See also for a brief history of Keats’s grave in ‘The Protestant Cemetery’. 45. Appendix 7 includes all the poems I will be discussing in this section: ‘The Grave of Keats’, ‘Endymion’ and ‘The Garden of Eros’.



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177

46. The edition of Wilde’s poems used throughout this section is the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, introduction by Vyvyan Holland (London: Collins, 1990). Subsequent references will appear in the text. 47. In a letter to Lord Houghton, c.16 June 1877, Wilde comments on the marble tablet next to Keats’s grave. He does not attempt to alter the ‘fairly good lines of poetry on it’, but critiques Wood’s relief for not capturing the ‘finely cut nostril, and Greek sensuous delicate lips’ that he supposes Keats to have possessed. (The Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis [London: Hart-Davies, 1962], p. 41. Subsequent references to Wilde’s letters will appear in the text). As James Najarian suggests, Wilde ‘condemned the more anatomically accurate paintings’ of Keats, preferring instead ‘Severn’s feminized, beautified, popularized versions’. See Victorian Keats: Manliness, Sexuality, and Desire (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 44. 48. This description appears in a version of the poem that was enclosed in a letter to Lord Houghton, discussed in the previous note, along with a third, slightly different version entitled ‘Heu Miserande Puer’ (see ‘The Tomb of Keats’, Irish Monthly Magazine [July 1877], 476–8). The edition of Wilde’s essays I will be referring to throughout this section is The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, edited by Richard Ellman (London: W. H. Allen, 1970). 49. Letter dated January 1893, quoted in Melissa Knox, Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely Suicide (London: Yale UP, 1994), p. 40. See also Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (London: Cassell, 1994). 50. Emma Speed was the daughter of George Keats, the poet’s younger brother who emigrated to America in 1818. After hearing a lecture given by Wilde in Kentucky on 21 February 1882, she invited the speaker to look at Keats’s letters and manuscripts. Speed subsequently sent Wilde the manuscript of ‘Sonnet on Blue’ to which he responded: ‘It is a sonnet I have always loved, and indeed who but the supreme and perfect artist could have got from a mere colour a motive so full of marvel; and now I am half enamoured of the paper that touched his hand, and the ink that did his bidding, grown fond of the sweet comeliness of his charactery.’ 51. James Najarian, ‘ “Greater Love”: Wilfred Owen, Keats, and a Tradition of Desire’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 47 (2001), 20–39 (pp. 21, 23). 52. Najarian reminds us that Wilde’s adopted name Sebastian ‘adds a distinctly homoerotic element’ to the image of Keats pierced by critics’ arrows (Victorian Keats, p. 19). 53. Other authors, namely Thomas Hood and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, also referred to Keats as Endymion. 54. Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 13. In representing Keats as Adonais, Shelley is not only alluding to the mythological significance of this figure, but also equating the dead poet with his own effeminised portrayal of the character.



Notes

Notes

55. The theme of belatedness is also a concern for Keats in Endymion: ‘Ay, the count / Of mighty Poets is made up [. . .] the sun of poesy is set’ (II, 723–4, 729). 56. David Bergman, Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature (Wisconsin: Wisconsin UP, 1991), pp. 44, 45 (original emphasis). 57. See Jonathon Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 65. 58. The edition of Hardy’s poems referred to throughout this section is Thomas Hardy: A Critical Selection of his Finest Poetry, edited by Samuel Hynes (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984). Subsequent references to his poems will appear in the text. 59. Even though the later poem, ‘At a House in Hampstead Sometime Dwelling of John Keats’ (1920), moves from Rome to England and focuses on the subject, Keats is still an ‘umbraged ghost’, a malcontent ‘haunting’ the author (15, 1). Another feature common to all Hardy’s elegies on Keats, including ‘At Lulworth Cove a Century Back’ (1920), is the prevalence of question marks: the repeated half-line ‘You see that man?’ structures the central section of ‘Lulworth Cove’, while the first five verses of ‘At a House in Hampstead’ end with questions. This insistent uncertainty derives, in part, from guilt as Hardy felt burdened by the poor critical reception Keats received during his lifetime.

2

Pre-raphaelite visions of Keats’s poetry

1. Letter from Thomas Hall Caine to William Michael Rossetti, dated 27 September 1879, in reference to Arthur Hughes’s painting ‘Music Party’ (which was accompanied by a quotation from ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’). For more details on the Caine correspondence, see Chapter 3, n. 16. 2. Julie F. Codell, ‘Painting Keats: Pre-Raphaelite Artists Between Social Transgressions and Painterly Conventions’ Victorian Poetry, 33 (1995), 341–70 (p. 366). 3. Hunt’s formative relationship with Keats’s work is recorded in the artist’s autobiography, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 2 vols (New York: AMS Press, 1967), I, pp. 105–7. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations by Hunt on the subject of Keats are taken from these pages. G. H. Fleming argues that Hunt knew of Keats’s poetry as early as 1845. See John Everett Millais: A Biography (London: Constable, 1998), p. 35. 4. George H. Ford, Keats and the Victorians: A Study of His Influence and Rise to Fame 1821–1895 (London: Archon Books, 1962), pp. 107–8. 5. Letter to George and Georgiana Keats written between December 1818 and January 1819. 6. J. R. MacGillivray goes even further, suggesting that Keats was not only a crucial influence on the PRB but, albeit anachronously, was actually a member of the movement: ‘Keats was really a Pre-Raphaelite – thirty years before the Brotherhood.’ Keats: A Bibliography and Reference Guide



178

7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

179

with an Essay on Keats’ Reputation (University of Toronto: Toronto UP, 1949), p. lx. See n. 4. Hunt’s comment on Keats’s verse comes from his autobiography, PreRaphaelitism, p. 80. Rossetti’s statement is quoted in Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, edited by Georgiana Burne-Jones, 2 vols (London: Lund Humphries, 1993), I, p. 145. Stephen Spender, ‘The Pre-Raphaelite Literary Painters’, in Pre-Raphaelitism: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by James Sambrook (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1974), pp. 118–25 (p. 121). Percy Muir, Victorian Illustrated Books (London: B. T. Batsford, 1971), p. 207. Arthur Henry Hallam, ‘On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson’, Englishman’s Magazine (August 1831), pp. 616–28. Quoted in Keats: Narrative Poems, edited by John Spencer Hill (London: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 61–2. Such a subjective response to this poem was not unique and merely served as an invitation to Keats’s detractors. His ‘artistry’ was associated with ‘a kind of prettifying ornateness and fussiness’ characteristic of the Cockney School (Kelvin Everest, ‘ “Isabella” in the market-place: Keats and feminism’, in Keats and History, edited by Nicholas Roe [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995], pp. 107–26 [p. 109]). Jack Stillinger, ‘The “story” of Keats’, in The Cambridge Companion to Keats, edited by Susan Wolfson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), pp. 246–60 (pp. 257, 258). Review of The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis and the Visual Arts by Grant F. Scott, in The Keats-Shelley Review, 10 (1996), p. 108. See Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 97–104. The Paragone debate, or Ut Pictora Poesis, is testament to the creative ‘productivity’ of ekphrasis. Quoted in Anne Clark Amor, William Holman Hunt: The True Pre-Raphaelite (London: Constable, 1989), p. 43 (original emphasis). Pre-Raphaelites Re-Viewed, edited by Marcia Pointon (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989), pp. 5–8. Codell, ‘Painting Keats’, p. 352. Judith Bronkhurst is equally convinced by Hunt’s didactic narrative: see The Pre-Raphaelites, edited by Leslie Parris (London: Tate Gallery, 1984), pp. 57–8. Wayne Cook, ‘John Keats and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: Pictorial Poetry and Narrative Painting’, University of Hartford Studies in Literature, 20 (1988), 1–21 (p. 8). See Cook, ‘Keats and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’, p. 3. Millais lamented a lack of vibrancy in art of the period: ‘when the turn of violet comes, why does the courage of the modern imitator fail? If you notice, a clean purple is scarcely ever given these days’ (quoted in Amor, The True Pre-Raphaelite, p. 32). Despite Millais’s complaint, it is noticeable that the young women in Arthur Hughes’s work are usually clothed in



Notes

22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

Notes

brilliant shades of purple, most notably in scenes of courtship: ‘The Long Engagement’, ‘The Pained Heart’, ‘Fair Rosamund’, ‘The Brave Geraint’, ‘The Rift within the Lute’ and ‘A Music Party’. William Morris purchased Hughes’s ‘April Love’ (1855–6) soon after completion because of his association between violet and desire. A History of British Art, Andrew Graham-Dixon. BBC Television, 1996. Cook suggests that Keats was the most significant influence: ‘Before he “skimmed” – the word is his – Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Hunt took from Keats a foundation for his belief that he should paint something new, of his time, with the same vividness and intensity that he praised in Keats’ (‘Keats and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’, p. 5). See Christopher Wood, The Pre-Raphaelites (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981), p. 14; Russell Ash, Sir John Everett Millais (London: Pavilon, 1996), Plate 3; Ash, Millais, Plate 3; Steven Adams, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (London: New Burlington Books, 1992), p. 33; and Andrew Graham-Dixon, A History of British Art (London: BBC Worldwide Limited, 1996), p. 175. Lynne Pearce, Woman/Image/Text: Readings in Pre-Raphaelite Art and Literature (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 96. The Athenaeum (1849), p. 575, quoted at length in Pre-Raphaelitism, I, pp. 178–9. Letter to Shelley, dated 16 August 1820, commenting on The Cenci. Elizabeth Jones, ‘Writing for the Market: Keats’s Odes as Commodities’, Studies in Romanticism, 34 (1995), 343–64 (p. 343). See Kurt Heinzelman, ‘Self-Interest and the Politics of Composition in Keats’s “Isabella”’, ELH, 55 (1988), 159–93. Cedric Watts claims that it was this dictionary that provided Keats with his striking lines of pearl divers suffering from decompression sickness in ‘Isabella’, an image in which the relation between economic gain, human loss, and poetic sensation is vividly realised. See Cedric Watts, A Preface to Keats (London and New York: Longman, 1985), p. 6. Susan Wolfson, The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986), p. 280. W. M. Rossetti, Life of John Keats (London: Walter Scott, 1887), p. 181; Literary Gazette (9 June 1849), p. 433. The PRBs’ first proposed project was to illustrate Keats’s ‘Isabella’. If, as Codell suggests, Moxon’s rigorous protection of copyright had not prevented the scheme, ‘the plan to make copperplate etchings, [was] a lucrative commercial project’ (‘Painting Keats’, p. 348). This sketch was begun after the artist and Millais observed a Chartist demonstration which led to ‘bloody strife’. Hunt and Millais followed the demonstration from Russell Square, across Blackfriars to Kennington Court, but as the former recalled, ‘we did not venture on to the grass with the agitators’. Whilst taking a curious interest in the Chartist’s revolt, both artists remain at a safe distance, empathising with radicalism but not embracing it (Pre-Raphaelitism, I, p. 101). Bronkhurst in The Pre-Raphaelites, edited by Parris, p. 245.



180

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36. From a biographical perspective, Amor describes Hunt’s captivation with his father’s business when he was a child. Even though the family went to live in the suburbs of London, ‘young Holman continued to haunt the warehouse, keenly observing everything that went on in there’ (Amor, p. 15). A schoolbook, dated 12 September 1837, shows how heavily his interests were ‘biased in favour of simple accountancy and currency conversion, as befitted a boy who was meant to follow his father into trade’ (pp. 18–19). 37. As MacGillivray summarises, ‘he [Keats] was a merely literary poet in the narrowest sense of the term, out of all touch with the life of the age, without intellectual interests or moral concerns, a confectioner of verbal sweetmeats’ (Keats’ Reputation, p. xii). It is only relatively recently that Keats’s social and political concerns have become the subject of critical interest. See, for example, Nicholas Roe’s John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 38. Jan Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Women: Images of Femininity in Pre-Raphaelite Art (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), p. 47. 39. Bronkhurst in The Pre-Raphaelites, p. 245. 40. As Jason Rosenfeld states, ‘The career of Sir John Everett Millais [. . .] revolved around the Royal Academy of Arts’. See Pre-Raphaelite and Other Masters: The Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2003), p. 45. Thus, his membership of the PRB could be viewed as a temporary blip in an otherwise exemplary career (arguably, the Pre-Raphaelite rebellion could still be seen as centred on, and therefore intrinsically related to, the Academy). In later years, Millais would denounce the idea of ‘schools’ or groups of painters, such as the one to which he had previously belonged, dismissing them as ‘artistic cliques’. See ‘The Late President’, The Artist, 18 (1896), 385–92 (p. 386). 41. See Mary Bennett, Millais PRB–PRA (London: Royal Academy, 1967), p. 13. 42. A reviewer for The Artist lists some of the prices paid for Millais’s later work: ‘ “The Princes in the Tower” brought nearly £4,000, “The Order of Release” more than £2,800, “Victory, O Lord!” £2,047, “Jephthah” £3,990, and “Chill October” £3,225’ (p. 386). This rapid change in Millais’s fortunes is attributable to many factors; most significantly, alterations in the art market and a subsequent shift in public taste (for further discussion on this topic, see G. D. Leslie, The Inner Life of the Royal Academy [1914], George Moore, Modern Painting [1898], and Lucy Crane, Art and the Formation of Taste, in Bernard Denvir, The Late Victorians: Art, Design and Society 1852–1910 [London: Longman, 1986], pp. 33–6, 127–30, 217–20). On a personal level, the artist replaced his meticulous approach with a quicker, more impressionistic style. This facilitated the ‘line of production’, the ‘pot-boiler[s] of genius’ that characterise his later career (Other Masters, p. 45; The Artist, p. 390). 43. Codell, ‘The artist colonized: Holman Hunt’s “bio-history”, masculinity, nationalism and the English school’, in Re-framing the Pre-Raphaelites: Historical



Notes

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

55. 56.

57.

Notes

and Theoretical Essays, edited by Ellen Harding (Bournemouth: Scolar Press, 1996), pp. 211–29 (p. 215). The prie-dieu also belonged to Hunt. See Amor, pp. 193–4. See ‘The artist colonized’, p. 226. The artist was actually working on a portrait of his wife whilst painting ‘Isabella’. See Boccaccio’s introduction to The Decameron, translated by G. H. McWilliam (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 49–64. Letter to F. G. Stephens, dated 9 October 1866, quoted in The PreRaphaelites, p. 216. Bennie Gray in The Last Romantics: The Romantic Tradition in British Art, edited by John Christian (London: Lund Humphries, 1989), p. 92. Walter Crane’s ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ is a reverent portrait of Madeline in the act of worship. Her Victorian attire covers legs, arms and chest, her hair is swept neatly off her face, and her head is bowed modestly in prayer. This remains, however, a rare example of propriety in Keats-based art at this time. Averil Burleigh’s illustration of 1911 captures the conflict between sexuality and morality as Porphyro serenades Madeline while she is deep in prayer. This neat opposition is, however, problematised by the open curtains which invite access to the bed. See The Poems of John Keats (London: Chapman and Hall, 1911). Keats’s boundaries are never distinct; as sensuality permeates the prescribed territories of morality, Madeline’s religious desires are cautiously met by, or transferred into, a secular form of satisfaction. Therefore, an intersection between two seemingly irreconcilable themes is forced after the moment of consummation which causes the disorientation ‘and even dismay’ of both the heroine and the reader. See Fleming, Millais, pp. 203–6. See Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, USA: Harvard UP, 1982). All the paintings discussed in this section confine their respective heroine to a claustrophobic interior, a feature highlighted in Strudwick’s ‘Isabella’ by the windows which reveal an outer world into which the brothers flee. Quotations by Pearce in this paragraph refer to Woman/Image/Text, p. 105. As Ralph Pite suggests, there is an ‘ambiguous distance between narrator and protagonist’ in ‘Isabella’. Keats is self-conscious about his position in the text; therefore, in contrast with Millais’s painting, the reader is not forced to accept a single viewpoint. See Ralph Pite, ‘The Watching Narrator in “Isabella” ’, Essays in Criticism, 40 (1990), 287–302 (p. 288). David Gentleman’s illustration of 1966 addresses the gendered issue of specularity in this scene by revealing the secreted Porphyro as he parts the curtain to peer at Madeline. Therefore, both hero and heroine are equally subject to the viewer’s gaze, but our position – observing the oblivious Madeline – is still comparable to Porphyro’s. See The Poems of John Keats, edited by Aileen Ward (New York: The Heritage Press, 1966).



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58. Griselda Pollock, ‘What’s wrong with images of women?’, Screen Education, 24 (1977), 25–33 (p. 30). 59. Levinson states: ‘Madeline is self-seduced: Ravished by her own voluptuousness, voluntary, and in short masturbatory dreaming’, Keats’s Life of Allegary, p. 111. 60. Charlotte Yeldham, Women Artists in Nineteenth-Century France and England: Their Art Education, Exhibition Opportunities and Membership of Exhibiting Societies and Academies, with an Assessment of the Subject Matter of their Work and Summary Biographies, 2 vols (London: Garland Publishing, 1984), I, p. 150. 61. E. B. S., ‘Eleanor F. Brickdale: Designer and Illustrator’, The Studio, 13 (1898), 103–8 (p. 108). As MacGillivray states, ‘Keats was given his full share of fine paper and beautiful printing’ (Keats Reputaion, p. lxxi). The demand for lavishly illustrated volumes of Keats’s poetry increased steadily during the nineteenth century with a number of individual poems published as ornamental keepsakes. 62. Arthur Fish, Henrietta Rae (London: Cassell and Company, 1905), p. 99. Fish includes a colour reproduction of ‘Isabella’. 63. Dictionary of Women Artists, edited by Delia Gaze, 2 vols (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997), I, p. 318. 64. Isabella or the Pot of Basil (Edinburgh and London: T. N. Foulis, 1907). 65. For Bell’s illustration, see Poems by John Keats (London: George Bell & Sons, 1897), p. 175. 66. The Times (15 March 1886), p. 12. 67. See Academy Notes of 1895, p. 36, for a reproduction of Gloag’s ‘Isabella’, and Academy Notes of 1898, p. 94, for Bedford’s. In her catalogue of paintings by nineteenth-century women artists, Yeldham lists another version of ‘Isabella’ by Ida Nettleship which was exhibited in the same year as Bedford’s. 68. Quoted in Pearce, p. 98. 69. Hughes was not the only artist to be influenced by Hunt’s early rendering of ‘Eve’. E. A. Abbey’s illustrations to this poem show the lovers huddled together as they sneak past a drunken porter who is sprawled across the bottom of the staircase. See Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (January 1880), p. 173. 70. Keats is indicative of a larger trend towards the merely ‘illustrative’ in literary paintings of the late Victorian period. 71. Frank Bridge’s symphonic poem ‘Isabella’ was performed for the first time in 1907, marking a final flourish of creative interest in Keats’s tale. However, in recent years a number of works attest to the continuing cultural legacy of ‘Isabella’: Caroline Blackburn’s ‘L’Amico Fritz’ (2000), a painting based on Mascagni’s opera, features a pot of basil as ‘a personal bow to the Pre-Raphaelites and Romantics in specific terms to both the poem and the painting Isabella and the Pot of Basil’ (http://www.leopardskin.co.uk/ opera/fritz.html). In addition, Jennifer Gentile’s ‘Isabella Holding a Pot of Basil’ (1994) and Mike Groom’s ‘A Pot of Basil’ (2003) register an emerging interest in film shorts based on this source. The visual potential



Notes

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of Keats’s poetry is no longer limited to the ‘traditional’ arts, but lends itself to a modern, multimedia age. 72. Aubrey Beardsley’s illustration of ‘Isabella and the Pot of Basil’ for The Pall Mall Magazine epitomises this trend. The full-length female figure brooding over her beloved’s decapitated remains trades on the now formulaic image by Hunt (the obligatory watering can – also seen in Waterhouse’s version – is evident to the left of the drawing). However, rather than the lush growth of basil in Hunt’s version, Beardsley’s plant is withered, indicating the current climate of visual interactions with this source. In addition, two flowing lines converge to create the impression of a crocodile’s jaw pointing in between the heroine’s legs. This threatening image suggests the artist’s sensitivity to, and abnormal exaggeration of, the Pre-Raphaelites’ focus on the theme of sexuality in Keats’s poetry. Beardsley is therefore satirising and re-interpreting what has become anecdotal. Echoing Keats’s regard for romance in the poem itself, Beardsley’s ‘Isabella’ works within, yet displays his discomfort at, the conventional.

3

Rossetti’s influence on Keats’s posthumous reputation

1. George Milner, ‘On Some Marginalia Made by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in a Copy of Keats’s Poems’, Englische Studien, 61 (1929), 211–9 (p. 212). Jerome McGann’s discussion of Rossetti’s aesthetic raises a number of parallels with Keats. If we accept – as outlined in the introduction – the inherent ambiguity of Keats’s verse, then Rossetti’s indefiniteness, his resistance to finality, mirrors the forefather. The ability to create ‘multiple perspectives in a single picture’, offering different views of the same subject, is distinctly Keatsian. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game that Must be Lost (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000), p. 106. 2. Quoted in George H. Ford, Keats and the Victorians: A Study of his Influence and Rise to Fame 1821–1895 (London: Archon Books, 1962), p. 109. Rossetti referred to Keats as ‘a glorious fellow’ in a letter to his brother, dated 20 August 1848. See The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Formative Years, 1835–1862: Charlotte Street to Cheyne Walk, edited by William E. Fredeman, 2 vols (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), I, p. 68. 3. Julie F. Codell, ‘Painting Keats: Pre-Raphaelite Artists Between Social Transgressions and Painterly Conventions,’ Victorian Poetry, 33 (1995), 341–70 (p. 342). See also Codell, ‘The artist colonized: Holman Hunt’s “bio-history”, masculinity, nationalism and the English school’, in Reframing the Pre-Raphaelites: Historical and Theoretical Essays, edited by Ellen Harding (Bournemouth: Scolar Press, 1996), pp. 211–29 (p. 211). 4. As Jan Marsh states, Rossetti’s sketch of ‘La Belle Dame’ was ‘the first surviving criticism sheet, dated March 1848’, yet it should also be remembered that ‘the earliest surviving Cyclographic drawing is a study for Hyperion by Holman Hunt, inscribed and dated 1847’. Hunt may have



184

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

185

produced the first interart interpretation of Keats’s poetry, but it was not the work specified by the artist. See Jan Marsh, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Poet (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), p. 41. Arthur C. Benson, Rossetti (London: Macmillan, 1904), p. 12. Rossetti recalls that he began reading ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ when he was eighteen see Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Keats: Criticism and Comment (London: Thomas J. Wise, 1919), p. 14. William Michael Rossetti suggests that his brother was even younger when he became interested in Keats, ‘Towards 1846 Bailey’s Festus, and from a rather earlier date Keats, also ranked with the highest’, while Ford dates Rossetti’s ‘discovery’ of Keats to a specific year, 1845. See W. M. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer (London: Cassell & Company, 1889), p. 7. Quoted in Ford, Keats and the Victorians, p. 93. The edition referred to is cited above: Rossetti, John Keats: Criticism and Comment. William Gaunt, The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965), p. 219. ‘The last phase’ is a chapter heading in this study. Even though McGann questions the perception of Rossetti and his work as a failure, his final chapter is called ‘Sinking Star’ and the title of his study suggests the ultimate futility of his subject’s aesthetic (see Game that Must be Lost, pp. 143–57). Recovery, Respite, Catastrophe and Decline are all chapters in Marsh’s biography of Rossetti. Thomas Hall Caine, Recollections of Rossetti, 2nd edn (London: Cassell and Company, 1928), p. 33. Roger C. Lewis, ‘The Making of Rossetti’s Ballads and Sonnets and Poems (1881)’, Victorian Poetry, 20 (1982), 199–216 (p. 202). Philip Marston suggested such an enterprise to ‘restore him [Rossetti] to his kingdom’ (see Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy, pp. 215–20). The first significant movement, consisting of adopted Pre-Raphaelite ‘brothers’, bonded to the extent that Anne Clark Amor questions the sexual tendencies of certain members. The moment which began the movement is presented as decidedly homoerotic: ‘A common love of Keats drew Rossetti like a magnet to Hunt’s studio, and the two men immediately became intimate’ (Anne Clark Amor, William Holman Hunt: The True Pre-Raphaelite [London: Constable, 1989], p. 35). A reunion between these men is described in similar terms: ‘One look and they were embracing each other as thankfully as lovers after a quarrel’ (p. 54). Thomas Woolner, an original member of the Brotherhood, suspected that the relationship between Hunt and Millais was homosexual, which the former later denied, but as Amor states, ‘whatever their exact relationship, they were intensely emotionally dependent on each other, and in later years both men found it difficult to establish satisfactory relationships with women’ (p. 42). Vivien Allen, Hall Caine: Portrait of a Victorian Romancer (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), p. 95.



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186

Notes

He [Caine] was introduced to Rossetti’s poetry by a casual acquaintance during a holiday in the Lake District. The Liverpool city council had booked him to give a series of lectures at the Public Library that winter. Fired with a proselyte’s enthusiasm, he threw out his original scheme and devoted his lectures to Rossetti’s poetry instead. When they were completed, in March, 1879, he rewrote them for publication and sent the magazine [Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine] in which they appeared to Rossetti.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

Vivien Allen, Dear Mr. Rossetti: The Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Hall Caine 1878–1881 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), pp. 9–10. This letter is dated 29 July 1879, and is part of an extensive correspondence housed in the Manx National Heritage Library on the Isle of Man. The letters between Rossetti and Caine have been edited by Vivien Allen (see n. 15), but the sections of the correspondence quoted in this chapter are from my own transcripts of the letters. Unless otherwise stated, all future references to the correspondence between Rossetti and Caine will derive from my work on the letters and will subsequently be dated in the text (the date given is as it appears on the manuscript). I am most grateful for Vivien Allen’s guidance and the help of Roger Sims, Librarian Archivist at the Manx National Heritage Library, for allowing me to handle original and unpublished material within the Hall Caine archive. Quoted in Allen, Dear Mr. Rossetti, p. 7. Paul Hammond, Love Between Men in English Literature (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 133. Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, edited by Oswald Doughty and John Robert Wahl, IV (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 1621. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text with the relevant page number. I should clarify, before elaborating upon this issue, that it is not my intention to reveal a hidden, homosexual Rossetti. The artist was reputed to be a ‘hot-blooded womanizer’ (Jan Marsh, The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal [London: Quartet Books, 1989], p. 84). Yet, as Marsh suggests in her biography of the artist, Rossetti appealed to both sexes: ‘It was said that there was not a woman he could not have won, and hardly a man who could resist his generous, genuine charm’ (Painter and Poet, p. xii). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia UP, 1985), p. 4. Caine wrote two sonnets on Oliver Madox Brown: the first was written in July 1880 and the second in July 1881. The sonnet I am concerned with here is the latter. Benson, p. 66. The press advertisement is part of the Hall Caine archive (see n. 16). Quotations from an advertisement in Thomas Hall Caine, Cobwebs of Criticism (London: Elliot Stock, 1883), p. 267.



15. Allen writes,

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24. Caine claims that during his stay with Rossetti, ‘I never met her [Jane Morris]’ because ‘as often as she came he would write a little note and send it out to me, saying: “The lady I spoke about has arrived and will stay with me to dinner. In these circumstances I will ask you to be good enough to dine in your own room to-night” ’ (Recollections, p. 141). Rossetti was evidently trying to keep his male and female acquaintances, or heterosexual and homosocial spheres, separate. 25. Robert Woof and Stephen Hebron, John Keats (Grasmere: Wordsworth Trust, 1995), p. 180. 26. See Milner, ‘On Some Marginalia’, p. 212, and Rossetti’s letter to Jane Morris, dated 28 January 1880 (Doughty and Wahl, p. 1704). 27. Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1, line 60. Rossetti cautioned Caine: ‘We will talk of your Sonnet book and of everything in the circle but not of outside matters of any kind which I do not entertain at all’ (13 April 1881, original emphasis). 28. See Chapter 1, pp. 31–3 for a detailed discussion of this sonnet. 29. See René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, translated by Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1965). 30. Similarly, McGann views the ‘unforgotten, unforgettable faces’ of Rossetti’s large canvases as ciphers; even though the subject is female, ‘a disturbing male gaze turns to look back at itself’ (Game that Must be Lost, p. 154). 31. E. Warwick Slinn, ‘Rossetti’s Elegy for Masculine Desire: Seduction and Loss in the House of Life’, in Haunted Texts: Studies in Pre-Raphaelitism, edited by David Latham (Toronto: Toronto UP, 2003), pp. 53–69 (p. 57). 32. An illustration by Max Beerbohm depicts Theodore Watts and Frederick Shields cautioning Caine against reading his ‘luridly arresting [. . .] literary efforts’ to Rossetti as they contribute to the artist’s insomnia. See Max Beerbohm, Rossetti and his Circle (London: William Heineman, 1922). 33. William E. Fredeman, ‘ “What is Wrong with Rossetti?”: A Centenary Reassessment’, Victorian Poetry, 20 (1982), xv–xxviii (p. xvii). 34. Quoted in Lewis, p. 203. Similarly, Caine regards ‘Hand and Soul’ as ‘charming’, and describes the sonnets as ‘exceedingly beautiful’ (24 February 1880; March 1880). 35. Gaunt refers to Rossetti as ‘the Prospero of Cheyne Walk’ in The PreRaphaelite Tragedy, p. 217, and Swinburne describes 16 Cheyne Walk as ‘the paternal household’ (The Swinburne Letters, edited by Cecil Y. Yang, 6 vols [New Haven: Yale UP, 1959], I, p. 118). Ford is a sterner critic and views the artist’s manipulative tendencies as ‘sheer bullying’ (Keats and the Victorians, p. 108). 36. See The Swinburne Letters, I, p. 118. 37. Rossetti almost sacrificed the £1550 offered by Liverpool Council for ‘Dante’s Dream’ as a point of principle over the non-exhibition of his work. For a further discussion of this incident, see Caine, Recollections, pp. 124–32. 38. Russell Ash, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Pavilion, 1995), p. 8.



Notes

Notes

39. Virginia Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882): A Catalogue Raisonné (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 156. Noticeably, an economic discourse encroaches on McGann’s discussion of Rossetti’s aesthetic. The artist ‘promises an art of consuming luxury’, producing works that ‘are about being expensive’, yet Rossetti remains mindful of ‘expenditure’, maintaining a balance between ‘imaginative profusion and waste’ (Game that Must be Lost, pp. 97, 151, 144). 40. Another ‘bonus’ that Rossetti tries to engineer for Caine is an acquaintance with Lord Houghton (who opposes Caine’s proposed lecture, for encroaching on his efforts to obtain a pension for Keats’s sister, but is finally appeased): ‘I am extremely glad you have got some recognition from Lord Houghton, as he may prove useful in one way or another’ (11 October 1880). 41. In the chapter entitled ‘The Principle of Reciprocity’, Lévi-Strauss outlines the significance of exchange and compensation in marriage. See The Elementary Structures of Kinship, rev edn, translated by James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer and Rodney Needham (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1969), pp. 52–68. 42. Letter dated 27 July 1820. Quoted in William Henry Marquess, Lives of the Poet: The First Century of Keats Biography (London: Pennsylvania UP, 1985), p. 63. For a discussion of Romantic and Victorian discourses of consumption, see Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (London: Penguin, 1991) and Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1999). 43. Marsh suggests that this process of self-fashioning began at an early age for Rossetti. A self-portrait of 1847 casts ‘the artist as a young poet in the style of Shelley or Keats’ (Painter and Poet, p. 22). 44. See Milner, ‘On Some Marginalia’, pp. 217–18 for an entire list of Rossetti’s ranking system. A system of asterisks was similarly applied to the PRB’s list of immortals: Keats attained the high rank of two stars. 45. Evelyn Waugh, Rossetti: His Life and Works (London: Duckworth, 1928), p. 208. 46. Robert Buchanan, ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D. G. Rossetti’, The Contemporary Review, 18 (1871), 334–50, in An Anthology of Pre-Raphaelite Writings, edited by Carolyn Hares-Stryker (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), pp. 237–47. Buchanan initially felt an affinity with Rossetti’s style, but was excluded from the avant-garde for his views on Swinburne. His scathing critique denounced the ‘thorough nastiness’ and intellectual inferiority of Rossetti’s poetry (‘Jenny’, in particular, was singled out for its supposed indecency). For a more detailed discussion of this controversy, see ‘The Aesthetic Conspiracy’ in J. B. Bullen, The PreRaphaelite Body: Fear and Desire in Painting, Poetry, and Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 157–64. 47. Thomas Hall Caine, Cobwebs of Criticism (London: Elliot Stock, 1883), pp. 175–80.



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48. Marsh argues that ‘late-onset breakdowns’, such as Rossetti suffered from, ‘are more common in those with high degrees of narcissism’ (Painter and Poet, p. 451). 49. Letter dated 19 May 1881, in Rossetti, Criticism and Comment, p. 16. 50. The English Poets: The Nineteenth Century: Wordsworth to Rossetti, edited by T. H. Ward, 5 vols (London: Macmillan, 1891), IV, 633–42. 51. Desmond MacCarthy, ‘Rossetti and Hall Caine’, in Portraits (London: Douglas Saunders with MacGibbon & Kee, 1955), pp. 226–33 (p. 229). 52. Alicia Craig Faxon, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Abbeville Press, 1989), p. 217. 53. See Milner, p. 215, for an example of Rossetti’s quasi-religious adoration of Keats. 54. For a discussion of Bakhtin’s formative ideas on aesthetics, see Deborah J. Haynes, Bakhtin and the Visual Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995). 55. Scheler’s theory is outlined and discussed in Deceit, Desire and the Novel, pp. 11–14. 56. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford UP, 1973). 57. The effect of this despondency on his work is revealed in a conversation with Caine in which he outlines a working practice dictated not by Romantic bursts of inspiration, but tried and tested procedures. ‘Now I paint by a set of unwritten but clearly defined rules, which I could teach to any man as systematically as you could teach arithmetic.’ ‘Still,’ I said, ‘there’s a good deal in a picture beside what you can do by rule eh?’[. . .] ‘Conception, no doubt; but beyond that, not much.’ (Recollections, p. 80) 58. Whilst the subject interested Rossetti over a period of years, resolution became increasingly elusive. 59. Quoted in Marsh, p. 431. 60. In both Hyperion. A Fragment and The Fall of Hyperion. A Dream, Mnemosyne imparts visionary gifts and musical talents onto the male subject. She is ‘an awful Goddess’, ancient and powerful, who empowers the poet: by contrast, in his inability to complete the tribute to Mnemosyne, Rossetti displays the weakness that Keats’s Apollo discards (Hyperion. A Fragment, 46). 61. See ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’ in W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 1994), pp. 151–81 (p. 154). 62. McGann, p. 150; Mitchell, p. 154. To purists such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and C. S. Baldwin, ekphrasis is a transgression of artistic boundaries, an ‘amplification rather than progression’. See Lessing, Laocoon, translated by Ellen Frothingham (New York: Noonday, 1957), and Baldwin, Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic (New York: Macmillan, 1924), p. 12.



Notes

Notes

63. See Grant F. Scott, The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts (Hanover and London: New England UP, 1994), pp. 31–4. Both Baldwin and Moore’s comments recall early objections to Keats’s poetry, thereby reinforcing the ideological problems of ekphrasis when interpreting this poet. 64. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi states that ‘in Victorian society the arts were becoming feminized’, and Rossetti repeatedly saw himself in terms of a prostitute who was economically dependent upon patrons and publishers. In Part I, I noted Rossetti’s regard for Keats as a female commodity, a bargaining tool, thereby transposing onto the subject his own insecurities over being ‘an effeminized victim dependent upon masculine capital’. See Gelpi, ‘The Feminization of D. G. Rossetti’, in The Victorian Experience: The Poets, edited by Richard A. Levine (Columbus: Ohio UP, 1982), pp. 94–114 (pp. 104, 108). 65. See Bryan Wolf, ‘Confessions of a Closet Ekphrastic: Literature, Painting and Other Unnatural Relations’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 3 (1990), 181–204. 66. Marsh describes how in the early years of the Brotherhood, Rossetti ‘proposed that everyone illustrate Keats’s Isabella’. Hunt drew ‘Lorenzo at his Desk in the Warehouse’ and Millais responded with a drawing that would become the preliminary design for ‘Isabella and Lorenzo’ (both of which are discussed in Chapter 2). Rossetti did not, however, attempt a design. His failure to engage visually with Keats’s poetry is not only ‘characteristically contrary’, but also indicative of his relationship with the forefather (Painter and Poet, p. 42). 67. John Beer, Romantic Influences: Contemporary-Victorian-Modern (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), p. 51. 68. See W. M. Rossetti, The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Ellis, 1911), pp. 268–9. 69. Lucy Newlyn, ‘The Anxiety of the Writing Subject’, Studies in Romanticism, 35 (1996), 609–28. 70. Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (London: Chatto & Windus, 1971), pp. 133–4. Cited in Beer, Romantic Influences, p. 52. 71. Rossetti had a keen eye for detecting Keats’s influence in the work of his siblings. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Rossetti feared that lines in Christina’s ‘A Royal Princess’ were too reminiscent of Keats, and similarly cautioned William against over-reliance on this particular poet. 72. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, pp. 87–8 (original emphasis), and G. Kim Blank, Wordsworth’s Influence on Shelley: A Study of Poetic Authority (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 20.

4


1. See Leonard Roberts, Arthur Hughes: His Life and Works; A Catalogue Raisonné (Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1997), pp. 150–2. 2. Regardless of when they were popular, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, ‘Isabella’ and ‘La Belle Dame’ attracted numerous painters and illustrators. If



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3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

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not equally fruitful, other poems by Keats also inspired visual interpretations. As Helen Haworth states, ‘Endymion was evidently enormously popular in the nineteenth century, among the wider reading public if not among the more sophisticated critics’, and proceeds to discuss the ‘two magnificent folio editions’ of 1873 and 1888 (‘ “A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever?”: Early Illustrated Editions of Keats’s Poetry’, Harvard Literary Bulletin, 21 [1973], 88–103 [pp. 93, 89]). The former contained six engravings by F. Joubert from original paintings by Edward John Poynter. Elenore Abbott’s illustrations for Endymion are equally noteworthy due to their strong lines and vivid movement, a style particularly suited to a depiction of Circe (some of Claude Shepperson’s visual renderings on this theme are also striking). Fullscale oil paintings include, amongst many others, H. O. Walker’s semi-circular Endymion in the Library of Congress, Washington DC, in which the hero is shown in a typical state of repose beneath a crescent moon. Grant F. Scott, ‘Language Strange: A Visual History of Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci” ’, Studies in Romanticism, 38 (1999), 503–35 (p. 503). Quotation by William Morris in The Poems of John Keats, edited by Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1970), p. 501. Eugene Mason comments on the artist’s relationship with Keats: ‘Morris was wholehearted in allegiance, holding him to be the first of modern poets’ (‘The Influence of Keats’, The Bookman [February 1921], 185–7 [p. 186]). ‘La Belle Dame’s’ appeal was not limited to visual interpretations; the poem also attracted numerous composers during this period. On The Lied and Art Song Texts Page, Ted Perry lists twelve musical arrangements for ‘La Belle Dame’ dating from 1877 to 1945. These include Edward MacDowell’s symphonic poem of 1888 (not performed until 1908), Cecil Armstrong Gibbs’s score of 1929, and Charles Villiers Stanford’s arrangement of 1877 (see http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/). Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (London: Harvard UP, 1982), p. 7. See Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, rev. edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1961). Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, 3 vols (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1989), II, p. 8. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, 2nd edn, translated by Angus Davidson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1951), pp. 199, 212–3. Karen Swann, ‘Harassing the Muse’, in Romanticism and Feminism, edited by Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988), pp. 81–92 (p. 88). Paul Edwards, ‘Ambiguous Seductions: “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, “The Faerie Queen” and “Thomas the Rhymer” ’, Durham University Journal, 51 (1990), 199–203 (p. 203). Mythical and Fabulous Creatures: A Source Book and Research Guide, edited by Malcolm South (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1987). See, in particular, the section by Ruth Berman, pp. 147–53.



Notes

Notes

13. ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’, in Julia Kristeva: The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwells, 1986), pp. 34–61 (p. 47). 14. Other possible sources for Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame’ include Alain Chartier’s ballad of the same name, Palmerin of England, Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (IV, I), ‘The Mermaid of Galloway’ by Allan Cunningham and William Hilton’s painting, ‘The Mermaid’. 15. The version of the ballad I am referring to is entitled ‘True Thomas and The Queen of Elfland’. 16. A notable example is Miriam Allott’s annotated edition of Keats’s poems, which states that ‘La Belle Dame’ was ‘strongly influenced by memories of Spenser’s fatal enchantresses in The Faerie Queen’ (p. 500). 17. The edition used is The Faerie Queen, edited by Thomas P. Roche (London: Penguin, 1978). Subsequent references will appear in the text. 18. Ronald Tetreault, ‘Women and Words in Keats (with an Instance from La Belle Dame sans Merci)’, in The Mind in Creation: Essays on English Romanticism in Honour of Ross G. Woodman, edited by J. Douglas Kneale (Ottawa: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1992), pp. 58–73 (p. 59). 19. Earl R. Wasserman, The Finer Tone: Keats’ Major Poems (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1953), pp. 74–5. See also Bernard Breyer, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, Explicator, 6 (1947), p. 18, and Charles I. Patterson, The Daemonic in the Poetry of John Keats (London: Illinois UP, 1970), pp. 125–51. 20. Anne K. Mellor, English Romantic Irony (London: Harvard UP, 1980), pp. 93–4. 21. Gerald Enscoe, Eros and the Romantics: Sexual Love as a Theme in Coleridge, Shelley and Keats (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), p. 141. 22. Jacqueline M. Labbe, Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 108–10. 23. Karla Alwes, Imagination Transformed: The Evolution of the Female Character in Keats’s Poetry (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993), p. 106. 24. Richard Monckton Milnes, Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats, 2 vols (London: Moxon, 1848). 25. Jerome J. McGann, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 32, 38. The chapter entitled ‘Keats and Historical Method’ discusses the ‘sociological poetics’ of the two versions (p. 62). See also McGann’s A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (London: Chicago UP, 1983), pp. 23–4, for his theory of the critical edition and the copy-text, and Theresa M. Kelley, ‘Poetics and the Politics of Reception: Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” ’, English Literary History, 54 (1987), 333–62. 26. Virginia M. Allen, ‘ “One Strangling Golden Hair”: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lady Lilith’, Art Bulletin, 66 (1984), 285–94 (p. 287). 27. Rossetti referred to his later works as ‘my beauties’, and described ‘A Vision of Fiametta’ as a ‘ripper’. Russell Ash, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Pavilion), Plates 22, 38. 28. Elizabeth G. Gitter, The Power of Women’s Hair in the Victorian Imagination’, PMLA, 99 (1984), 936–54 (p. 948).



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29. Anthony Hobson, The Art and Life of J. W. Waterhouse RA, 1849–1917 (London: Studio Vista and Christie’s, 1980), p. 76. See also Anthony Hobson, J. W. Waterhouse (London: Phaidon, 1989). 30. Waterhouse’s 1905 painting of ‘Lamia’ similarly focuses on a doleful rather than destructive woman. Like his vision of the Belle Dame, Waterhouse’s Lamia is wistful and even her hair is coiled into a bun at the base of her neck rather than wound around the hero’s neck. The only hint of a reptilian nature is the scaly pattern on her dress. By the 1909 version of ‘Lamia’, the metamorphosis from siren to warm-blooded woman is complete; she has shed her snake-like skin – now draped across her delicate pink dress – and assumed a new identity. As Lamia gazes at her reflection in the pond, readjusting to Selfhood after the restrictive cast of Otherness, Waterhouse’s painting mirrors the chameleonic changeability of Keats’s heroines. Similarly capturing a Keatsian moment of transformation, Anna Lea Merritt’s 1906 version of ‘Lamia’ focuses on the heroine arising from her previous existence of siren as a New Woman. 31. Quoted in Art and Life, p. 76. 32. Wilfred Mellers and Rupert Hildyard, ‘The Edwardian Age and the InterWar Years’ in The Cambridge Guide to the Arts in Britain: The Edwardian Age and Inter-War Years, edited by Boris Ford, 9 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), VIII, p. 18; John Ferguson, The Arts in Britain in World War One (Southampton: Stainer and Bell, 1980), p. 3. 33. Theodore Roszak, ‘The Hard and the Soft: The Force of Feminism in Modern Times’, in Masculine/Feminine: Readings in Sexual Mythology and the Liberation of Women, edited by Betty and Theodore Roszak (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), pp. 87–104 (p. 88). 34. Volume Two of Gilbert’s and Gubar’s trilogy No Man’s Land is subtitled ‘Sexchanges’. 35. Amanda Kavanagh, ‘A Post Pre-Raphaelite: Sir Frank Dicksee’, Country Life (1985), 240–2 (p. 241). 36. E. Rimbault Didbin, ‘The Art of Frank Dicksee, RA’, Christmas Art Annual (1905), 1–32 (p. 15). 37. Joseph A. Kestner, Masculinities in Victorian Painting (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), p. 105. See also ‘The Male Gaze in the Art of Frank Dicksee’, Annals of Scholarship, 7 (1990), 181–201. 38. Dicksee’s painting is reminiscent of previous renderings of this poem. Walter Crane’s 1865 version shows the woman on horseback looking down on the knight (Crane’s knight is, however, moving along with the lady). Painted two years earlier, Arthur Hughes’s 1863 version of ‘La Belle Dame’ is equally ambiguous. Once again, the Belle Dame is positioned above the knight as she sits on his horse, yet his physical stature dominates the centre of the composition and he holds the reins. Scott observes that ‘the painting is a tangle of ideological contradictions’, combining both versions of the text: the man can be seen as a ‘knight-at-arms’ and a ‘wretched wight’, while the Belle Dame can be seen as a temptress or an innocent victim yearning for companionship (‘Language Strange’,



Notes

39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

47.

Notes

p. 515). As I will demonstrate shortly, Keats’s ballad elicits contradictory responses from even the most predictable painters. Quoted in ‘The Male Gaze’, p. 184. See Didbin, p. 19. In her critical edition of Keats’s poems, Miriam Allott suggests a source for the word ‘thrall’ that refers to Lancelot. Cay’s translation of Dante’s Inferno includes the lines: ‘we read of Lancelot, / How him love thrall’d’ (V, 124–5). For a discussion of the ‘Sumptusus pageantry’ in this painting, see A. L. Baldry, ‘A Romanticist Painter: W Russell Flint’, Studio, 60 (1914), 253–64 (p. 254). The inclusion of the ‘pale kings and princes’ is not unique to this visual interpretation of the ballad. With its soft pastels, ethereal spectres, wily Belle Dame and comatose knight, Flint owes an obvious debt to Henry Meynell Rheam’s ‘La Belle Dame’ Sans Merci (1897). The position of the ghosts in Flint’s painting also resembles Arthur Hughes’s compositional arrangement of 1863, while menacing spectres feature in William Bell Scott’s illustration of 1873. The most striking rendering of the ‘pale kings and princes’ appears in Robert Anning Bell’s illustration of 1897 (see Poems by John Keats [London: George Bell & Sons, 1897]). The first image of this facing-page illustration shows the slumbering lovers enfolded in each other’s arms, yet the final word of the verso is ‘dream’d’ which signals to the spectres on the next page. The gulf of space between these images reinforces the illusory nature of the phantom-like projections. Emerging from the rock face at the top right of the composition, this eerie assembly hangs over the sleeping couple; ominous, unyielding and ancient, they represent a manifestation of the knight’s internalised fate. Pat Barker, The Ghost Road (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 46. Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 455. Keats probes these potentially volatile social junctures in his narrative poems. For example, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ juxtaposes the conventions of pre-arranged marriages with the impulsiveness of romantic love. Julie Codell reads this poem as the dramatic ‘collision of dying feudalism with emerging capitalism’, an interpretative model which can also be applied to ‘Isabella; or, the pot of’ (‘Painting Keats: Pre-Raphaelite Artists Between Social Transgressions and Painterly Conventions’, Victorian Poetry, 33 [1995], 341–70 [p. 350]). While this represents a limited view of the subtextual battles in Keats’s poetry, what emerges is how relevant this aspect of the Keatsian discourse was for the cultural climate of the early twentieth century when many authors and artists felt that they were ‘Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born’ (Matthew Arnold, ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’, 85–6). Kestner asserts that only one representation of Keats’s poem was by a female artist and, again incorrectly, credits Anna Lea Merritt’s painting with being the only canvas to picture the knight asleep (see Masculinities in Victorian Painting, p. 110). Around a quarter of a century before Flint depicted the Belle Dame hovering over a slumbering knight, Merritt’s



194

48.

49. 50.

51.

52.

53.

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1884 version, now lost, envisages a buxom Dame in Grecian pose with her hair cascading onto the drowsy knight. He leans against her, providing the horizontal platform for her central, columnar figure. For background information on King, see Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement (Somerset: Virago, 1989), pp. 137–9, and Colin White, The Enchanted World of Jessie M. King (Blantyre: Canongate, 1989). Walter R. Watson, ‘Miss Jessie M. King and her Work’, The Studio, 26 (1902), 176–88 (p. 187). In addition, King produced a number of bookplates for ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, one of which illustrates the last two lines of the poem (reproduced in The Studio, 26 [1902], p. 186). King’s elegant use of space and the confidence of her line are demonstrated in this design as two female figures face one another in perfect symmetry. The sphere which radiates loops across the women creates an endless circle, reflecting Keats’s linguistic poise and the unsolvable enigma of ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ King was not the first artist to represent the Belle Dame as a victim. Elizabeth Siddal’s treatment of the subject (c.1855) is stark with two figures compressed into the centre of the sketch as heavy horizontal lines force the knight down onto the Belle Dame. The knight is in control, oppressing the lady with his physical proximity and fingering her hair like a malevolent puppeteer. Rather than entrapping the knight in the fatal tresses that absorbed Rossetti the Belle Dame passively submits to her master. Moreover, it was not only female artists who sympathised with a ‘harassed’ Belle Dame. William Bell Scott’s illustration of 1873 depicts a vulnerable and clearly frightened woman who clings to the male for support. The Belle Dame is dependent on the knight yet even though he holds the reins of the horse, his head is lowered in an oblivious dream-state. Anticipating King’s sketch, the knight is not the enemy; he is merely misguided in his allegiances. Scott sees this sketch as an ‘anomaly’: it ‘resists the gender battles that typify most nineteenth-century representations of the ballad’ (p. 532). King’s lady is neither predator nor victim, and therefore the sketch is relegated to a coda at the end of the critic’s main argument. King’s sensitivity to the source is exceptional, yet it remains crucial to the evolution of these visual renderings. King is, for example, indebted to Waterhouse for the heroine’s expression of honest affection and, looking ahead, she anticipates Frank Cadogan Cowper’s post-war iconography. This sketch does not run ‘counter to the tradition’ of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century depictions of ‘La Belle Dame’, but plays a central part in its development. Of all the sirenesque creatures King visualised, not one conforms to the Victorian ‘stereotype’ of the femme fatale. Examples include a drawing of a woman caught in a fisherman’s net with the accompanying verso ‘Only a Little Mermaid Fast Asleep’, while numerous sketches show feminine



Notes

54.

55.

56.

57. 58.

59. 60.

Notes

sea-creatures as protectors of the ocean: ‘The Fisherman Watched Over by the Mermaids’, ‘Guardian Angels of the Sea’ and the playful nymphs in ‘The Mermaids’ Cove’. In ‘The Sea Voices’, enchanting mermaids appear before young girls who look up longingly; adorned with haloes, the sea voices represent females who have fulfilled an aspiration to remove themselves from the known world and exist within their own sphere. Whilst employing the Aesthetes’ loaded iconography, King resituates the ‘harassed’ figure of the mermaid within a visual discourse of empowerment. See, for example, Rossetti’s ‘How Sir Galahad, Sir Bors, and Sir Percival were fed with the Sanc Grael; but Sir Percival’s Sister Died by the Way’ (1864) and Burne-Jones’s tapestry, ‘The Failure of Sir Gawaine: Sir Gawaine and Sir Uwaine at the Ruined Chapel’ (1895–6). The figure of the dead knight appears elsewhere in King’s work. A sketch of the seventeenth-century folksong ‘The Twa Corbies’ focuses on the ‘new-slain knight’ as the ravens prepare to feast on his corpse (6). Although the gruesome details of the birds’ ‘dinner sweet’ bear no resemblance to Keats’s ballad, this folksong features a narrator who records another speaker and a ‘lady fair’ who callously finds herself ‘anither mate’ (8, 11, 12). This version of ‘The Twa Corbies’ is included in The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250–1900, edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1919). As the speaker points out, the knight’s death-like appearance is at odds with the season of plenty, autumn. In prematurely heralding the winter, he is effectively removed from Nature’s cycle and confined to stasis. See John Nash’s ‘Oppy Wood: Evening’ and Paul Nash’s ‘We Are Making a New World’. See, for example, Cowper’s later work, ‘The Four Queens’ (1954). Like Waterhouse, Dicksee and Flint, Cowper was a respected artist. He trained and exhibited at the Royal Academy where he was made a full member in 1936, and painted mainly literary, biblical and historical subjects. Peter Nahum refers to the artist as ‘one of the last exponents of the Pre-Raphaelite tradition’. See The Last Romantics: The Romantic Tradition in British Art, edited by John Christian (London: Lund Humphries, 1989), p. 134. See the chapter entitled ‘The Divides of War’, in Asa Briggs, A Social History of England, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 1987), pp. 292–317. Painted at the turn-of-the-century, Ferdinand Hodler’s ‘The Dream’ (Le Rêve, 1897–1903) presents a similarly fatalistic view of male mortality and romance. A girl with flowing, auburn hair sits in a field among long grasses and tall-stemmed flowers. Beneath her, in a rectangular inset, lies the figure of a man in a position comparable to that of Cowper’s knight. The significant difference in Hodler’s depiction is the man’s nakedness. In a complete reversal of the standard Victorian gaze, it is the ‘hero’ rather than the heroine who is vulnerable his displayed form is part of the female’s fantasy, her ‘dream’. Hodler’s depleted ‘hero’, like Keats’s knight, could be asleep ‘On the cold hill side’, experiencing the physical changes of his forebears: ‘I saw their starved lips in the gloam, / With



196

61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70.

71. 72.

73.

74.

75.

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horrid warning gapèd wide (44, 41–2).’ His wasted figure, skeletal hands and bluey-greenish pallor indicate disease and death. Recorded in Gertrude Stein’, Everybody’s Autobiography (London: William Heineman, 1938), p. xi. Lawrence is quoted in Ferguson, p. 37. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 2nd edn (London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1996), p. 1205. Women and World War One: The Written Response, edited by Dorothy Goldman (London: Macmillan, 1993), p. 1. Quoted in No Man’s Land, II, p. 32. Quoted in Praz, pp. 233–4. Walter Pater, ‘Leonardo da Vinci’, in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry: The 1893 Text, edited by Donald L. Hill (London: California UP, 1980), p. 98. Pater is quoting 1 Corinthians 10:11. Woman and War is the second section of Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labour (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1911). Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers, 20th edn (London: Muller, 1955), pp. 215–6. See Schreiner, Woman and Labour, pp. 77–9. Kipling’s slogan – ‘The female of the species is more deadly than the male’ – transfers the responsibility of the war onto women; men were thereby absolved of killing the enemy through a fetishised image of female sadism. Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, translated by Brian Murdoch (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 39. Cowper’s Belle Dame bears more than a passing resemblance to Averil Burleigh’s illustration of 1910 (in particular, the art-nouveau pattern of her dress and her position in the centre of the composition). However, Burleigh’s Belle Dame confronts the viewer with direct eye contact. Sitting amongst her previous victims, strung up in trees, she remains unrepentant, a woman without pity. This is her domain, yet by envisaging a powerful Belle Dame, Burleigh endorses the conservative view of woman as potential predator. This Belle Dame remains a ‘stubborn anachronism’ for Scott, being at once ‘a great red butterfly’ emerging from the knight’s armour and a ‘lethal spider who has ensnared her victim, drained his life-blood and abandoned his carcass’; she is a ‘new creature’ whilst also echoing Swinburne and Pater’s portrait of a woman ‘vain and indifferent to the despoliation of history’ (pp. 530–1). Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898), p. 144. Scott claims that in the second half of the twentieth century, ‘La Belle Dame’ ‘had clearly lost its currency and its capacity to charm. The genre had been exhausted’ (‘Language Strange’, p. 531). He does, however, list three artists – Aaron Judan (1955), David Gentleman (1966) and Michael Renton (1986) – who have engaged with Keats’s ballad, and a film



Notes

Notes

version, Ugetsu (1953), directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. At the time of writing, Renzo Roblodowski had three images from Keats’s poems, including ‘La Belle Dame’, on the web (see http:// academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/image-renzo/pages/ belle-dame-sans-merci.htm). 76. See Jeffrey Robinson’s appendix to Reception and Poetics in Keats: ‘My Ended Poet’ (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). 77. Tony Harrison, ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’ (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1981).



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Note: Page numbers in bold refers to figures. Allen, Virginia M., 116 Allen, Vivien, 82 Arnold, Matthew, 21 artistic medium, 4, 10, 45–6, 50, 64, 98–100, 141–2 Auerbach, Nina, 108, 116–17 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 6–7, 8, 97, 104 Barnard, John, 2 Bedford, Ella M., 74 Bell, Robert Anning ‘Isabella’, 72 ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, 194n43 Bennett, Andrew, 2 Blanchard, S. Laman, 15, 31 Bloom, Harold, 13, 98–100, 105 Boccaccio, Giovanni The Decameron, 54–5, 62, 76 Brawne, Fanny, 6, 95, 113 Brickdale, Eleanor Fortesque ‘Isabella’, 72 Brown, Oliver Madox, 81, 83–4 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 25 Browning, Robert, 29, 39, 103, 175n30 and ‘Adonais’, 22–3 ‘Popularity’, 9, 16, 22–5, 29, 147–9; and consumerism, 24–5; rebirth in, 23–5; recomposition in, 23 Caine, Thomas Hall, 83 correspondence with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 6, 10, 82–104, 186n15, n16 and homoeroticism, 84–5 as questor, 87–90, 97

Works: Cobwebs of Criticism, 86, 94 ‘John Keats’, 12, 146 ‘To OMB’, 84, 88, 165, 186n21 Cawein, Madison Julius ‘Lilith’s Lover’, 117 ‘Siren Sands’, 135 Cherry, Deborah, 7 Clare, John, 31 Codell, Julie F., 43, 48, 57–8, 59, 61–2 consumption, 5–7, 12–13, 17, 25, 51, 92, 143 gendering of, 7 see also Keats, John, death of, as tragic poet Cook, Wayne, 48 Cowper, Frank Cadogan, 196n58 ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, 132, 134, 136, 138, 140–1, 144, 196–7n60, 197n72, n73 Crabbe, George, 136 Crane, Walter, 107, 182n51, 193n38 Dante Alighieri, 103 Dicksee, Frank, 125–6 ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, 121–3 Edwards, Paul, 110–11 Enscoe, Gerald, 112 Epstein, Andrew, 12–13 Falconer, Rachel, 15 Fass, Barbara, 27 Faxon, Alicia Craig, 95, 99 First World War, 121–2, 126–7, 131–2, 134–5, 136 Fleming, G. H., 44–5 211



Index

Index

Flint, William Russell, 126 ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, 123–5 Frazer, James George, 20

‘Lorenzo at his Desk in the Warehouse’, 56–7, 180n34 ‘Rienzi’, 49 Jones, Elizabeth, 54

Gilbert, Sandra M., 109, 136 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 137–8 Girard, René, 87–8, 89, 96, 97, 104 Gittings, Robert, 45–6 Gloag, Isobel L., 74 Graham-Dixon, Andrew, 49, 50 Gubar, Susan, 109, 136 Hammond, Paul, 83, 85, 88 Hardy, Thomas, 9, 178n59 ‘At the Pyramid of Cestius Near the Graves of Shelley and Keats’, 40–1, 164 ‘The Darkling Thrush’, 131 Harrison, Antony H., 27 Harrison, Tony ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’, 143–5, 168–70 Heffernan, James A. W., 18 Heinzelman, Kurt, 54 Hildyard, Rupert, 120 Hobson, Anthony, 118 Homans, Margaret, 8 Houghton, Lord, see Milnes, Richard Monckton, Lord Houghton Hughes, Arthur, 179–80n21 ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, 75 ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, 107, 193n38 Hunt, William Holman, 10, 42, 43, 45, 55, 57–8, 79, 180n23 and consumerism, 59–62, 63–4, 77–8, 181n36 and later success, 59 Works: ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, 44, 47–9, 59 ‘Isabella and the Pot of Basil’, 59–64, 60; artistic responses to, 70–1, 72–3, 184n72; sexuality in, 61–2, 63–4

Keats, John as beloved, 87–8, 90, 96 and consumerism, 53–5, 57, 180n30 death of, 5–7, 12–13, 15–16, 92–3 and effeminacy, 7, 8, 37–8 epitaph of, 32–4 and indeterminacy, 2, 140, 142; see also negative capability letters of, 2, 3–4 and ornateness, 45–6, 123–4, 179n12, 183n61 and poetic identity, 1, 2, 5, 15, 16, 75; see also negative capability as tragic poet, 15–16, 23, 31, 90–92, 93–4 Works: Endymion, 15, 18, 22, 36, 37–9, 86; illustrations of, 190–1n2 ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, 42, 67, 194n46; illustrations of, 182n51; ornateness in, 45–6 ‘The Eve of St Mark’, 92 Hyperion: A Fragment, 49, 93, 99, 189n60 ‘Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil’, 42, 52–5, 57, 70–1, 182n56, 194n46; films of, 183–4n71; musical scores of, 183n71 ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, 11, 196n56; and bibliographic debate, 114–15, 120, 122–3, 192n25; femme fatale in, 108–12, 115–18, 120, 123, 136–40, 197n70; indeterminacy in, 110, 111, 112–14, 140–3; knight’s narrative in, 111–13, 118, 124–5, 127, 137, 140; literary heritage of, 110–11, 116, 192n14; musical scores of, 191n5;



212

regeneration in, 108–9, 138–9, 142 ‘Ode on Melancholy’, 32 ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, 20, 32 ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, 26 ‘On Seeing the Elgin Marbles’, 26 Kestner, Joseph A., 126 King, Jessie Marion, 195–6n53 ‘Isabella’, 71–2, 73 ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, 127–31, 128, 129, 130, 195n52, 196n55 ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, 195n50 Kristeva, Julia, 110 Labbe, Jacqueline M., 112–13 Lamb, Mary Montgomerie, 117 Lawrence, D. H., 133–4 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 90, 188n41 Levinson, Marjorie, 1, 46, 58, 70, 110, 140–1 Lowell, Amy, 8 McGann, Jerome J., 115, 184n1, 185n9, 187n30 Maclise, Daniel ‘Madeline After Prayer’, 64–7, 66 Manet, Edouard ‘Olympia’, 68–9 Marquess, William Henry, 2 Marsh, Jan, 72, 80, 99, 126–7 Mellers, Wilfred, 120 Mellor, Anne, 7, 112 metamorphosis, 17 metonymy, 17–18, 35, 68–9 Meynell, Alice, 9, 13, 26, 31, 32, 34, 39, 146 and ‘Adonais’, 30 ‘On Keats’s Grave’, 28–30, 151–2; flowers in, 29, 176n40; form of, 29; rebirth in, 30; recomposition in, 29–30; sexuality in, 30 and ‘Popularity’, 29 Michael, Jennifer Davis, 6, 171–2n16 Millais, John Everett, 10, 42, 43, 44

213

and later success, 58–9, 181n40, n42 Works: ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, 67–70, 67, 74–5; sexuality in, 68–70, 182n56 ‘Isabella and Lorenzo’, 49–52, 50, 55; consumerism in, 53; consumption in, 51; politics in, 49, 51–2 Milnes, Richard Monckton, Lord Houghton, 5, 15, 44, 115 Milton, John, 14, 22, 93 Moi, Toril, 8 Motion, Andrew, 1–2 Najarian, James, 8, 35–6, 37–8 negative capability, 1, 16, 118, 120 Newlyn, Lucy, 104–5 Nunn, Pamela Gerrish, 126–7 O’Neill, Michael, 18, 20 Orpen, William ‘A Village: Evening’, 134 Ovid, 17, 19 Packer, Lona Mosk, 27 Pater, Walter, 95, 135–6 Pearce, Lynne, 2–3, 63, 69 Pollock, Griselda, 7 Praz, Mario, 109, 117 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 4, 9–10, 42–7, 79–80, 108, 127 and consumerism, 57–8, 71–2, 76–8, 180n33, 184n72 formation of, 44–5, 48, 49, 55–6, 178n6 Rae, Henrietta ‘Isabella’, 71 Remarque, Erich Maria, 138 Ricks, Christopher, 37 Robinson, Jeffrey C., 12, 16, 28–9 Rossetti, Christina, 9, 13, 30, 31, 34, 39, 144 and ‘Adonais’, 26, 28 and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 26–7, 32, 33 Keats’s influence on, 26–7



Index

Index

Rossetti, Christina – continued ‘On Keats’, 26–8, 29, 150; allusions to ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ in, 27–8; allusions to ‘Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil’ in, 26–7; decomposition in, 28; form of, 26; sexuality in, 27–8 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 6, 10–11, 45, 116–18, 129, 137 and Christina Rossetti, 26–7, 32, 33 and consumerism, 91–3, 97, 188n39 correspondence with Thomas Hall Caine, 6, 10, 82–92, 186n15, n16 and eccentricity, 80–1, 89, 187n37 and ekphrasis, 100–1, 104, 189n62 and homoeroticism, 84–6, 92, 96–7, 104, 185n13, 186n19 and homosociality, 8, 10, 78–9, 83, 85, 187n24 and ill health, 81, 99–100 interest in Keats, 44, 45, 78–9, 86, 184n1, 185n5, 188n44, 190n71 and Keats’s epitaph, 32–3, 176n44 and Keats’s poetic identity, 11, 32, 86, 92–6, 97–8, 105 and lack of productivity, 10–11, 96, 98, 100–4, 107, 189n57, 190n66 as mediator, 87–90, 97, 187n35 Works: ‘John Keats’, 31–3, 34, 87, 155 ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, 11, 93 94, 101–3, 107, 115–16 ‘Mnemosyne’, 90, 91, 94, 99, 100, 101, 102–3, 189n58, n60 Rossetti, William Michael, 99, 103 Roszak, Theodore, 120–1 Sacks, Peter M., 13, 17, 174n19 Scharf, George, 75 Schenck, Celeste M., 26, 28 Schmidt, Michael, 1

Schreiner, Olive, 135–6, 137 Scott, Grant F., 108, 118 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 10, 89, 90–1, 104 Severn, Joseph, 36 ‘Keats Reading at Wentworth Place’, 3–4 Shakespeare, William, 103 Shelley, Mary, 21 Shelley, Percy Bysshe ‘Adonais’, 4, 9, 11, 22, 23, 26, 28, 30, 31, 35, 36, 37, 39, 46; ambition of author in, 13–14, 18–21; androgyny in, 6; effeminised subject in, 6–7, 177n54; figure of Adonis in, 19, 37; figure of Dionysus, 19, 25; impotency of subject in, 18, 19; Keats and the critics in, 14–15, 18; sensitivity of subject in, 6, 15 posthumous reputation of, 21–2 Siddal, Lizzie, 7, 195n51 Sinfield, Alan, 37 siren, 11, 108, 109, 115–17, 135–8 Speed, Emma, 35, 177n50 Spenser, Edmund The Faerie Queen, 110–11, 192n16 Stillinger, Jack, 2, 45–6 Strudwick, John Melhuish ‘Isabella’, 64, 65, 182n54 Surtees, Virginia, 101 Swann, Karen, 109 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 31, 135 ‘In Sepulcretis’, 31, 153–4 Tetreault, Ronald, 111, 113, 140 Thomas, Frances, 26–7 Thomson, James, 117–18 Wasserman, Earl R., 111 Waterhouse, John William ‘Isabella’, 74–5, 76 ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, 118–21, 119 ‘Lamia’, 193n30



214

Wilcox, Ella Wheeler ‘The King and the Siren’, 135–6, 166–7 Wilde, Oscar, 9, 13, 144 and ‘Adonais’, 35, 36, 37, 39 and Christina Rossetti, 34, 39 and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 33, 34, 39 and decomposition, 37, 41 and effeminacy, 37–9 and homoeroticism, 34–9 and recomposition, 34–5

215

Works: ‘Endymion’, 36–9, 142, 156–7 ‘The Garden of Eros’, 39, 40, 156–63 ‘The Grave of Keats’, 33–5, 156; Keats’s epitaph in, 33–4, 177n47 Wolfson, Susan J., 15, 21, 54–5 Women’s Rights Movement, 120–1, 134–8 Wylie, Philip, 137 Yeldham, Charlotte, 71



Index

Consuming Keats: Nineteenth Century Re-Presentations in Art and Literature

Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture)

Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture)

Transatlantic Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction

Transatlantic Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Colonies, Cults and Evolution: Literature, Science and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Writing (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture)

The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture)

Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Gothic Radicalism: Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis in the Nineteenth Century

Manly Leaders in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Suny Series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century)

Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Legitimacy and Illegitimacy in Nineteenth-Century Law, Literature and History (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

The Marked Body: Domestic Violence in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Literature

Spirits of America: Intoxication in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Romantic Friendship in Victorian Literature (The Nineteenth Century Series)

Physics in the nineteenth century

Physics in the nineteenth century

Imagining Equality in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (No. 157))

Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920 (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture)

Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Heroism and adventure in the nineteenth century

Jews and Revolution in nineteenth-century Russia

Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century England

Art History and Its Institutions: The Nineteenth Century

Antislavery Discourse and Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Incendiary Pictures

Literary Remains: Representations of Death and Burial in Victorian England (Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century)

The Nineteenth Century Sonnet

Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Consuming Keats: Nineteenth Century Re-Presentations in Art and Literature

Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture)

Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture)

Transatlantic Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction

Transatlantic Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Colonies, Cults and Evolution: Literature, Science and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Writing (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture)

The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture)

Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Gothic Radicalism: Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis in the Nineteenth Century

Manly Leaders in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Suny Series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century)

Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Legitimacy and Illegitimacy in Nineteenth-Century Law, Literature and History (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

The Marked Body: Domestic Violence in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Literature

Spirits of America: Intoxication in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Romantic Friendship in Victorian Literature (The Nineteenth Century Series)

Physics in the nineteenth century

Physics in the nineteenth century

Imagining Equality in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (No. 157))

Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920 (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture)

Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Heroism and adventure in the nineteenth century

Jews and Revolution in nineteenth-century Russia

Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century England

Art History and Its Institutions: The Nineteenth Century

Antislavery Discourse and Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Incendiary Pictures

Literary Remains: Representations of Death and Burial in Victorian England (Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century)

The Nineteenth Century Sonnet

Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

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