The Dilemma of a Young Liberal Poet: How to Read Tory Reviewers' Critique of Keats's Poetry

Abstract

This essay attempts to read Tory reviewers' critique of Keats's poetry as a historical instance where a liberal/radical poet's project of shaping an ideal public sphere through free communication with readers was distorted and ultimately frustrated. The two representative Tory reviews on Keats's early poetry were John Lockhart's in Blackwood's and John Wilson Croker's in the Quarterly Review, and they intended to criticize Poems of 1817 and Endymion. While these reviews purportedly aimed to critique the immature and vulgar aspects of Keats's poetry, their true objective was to target Keats's liberal/radical political creeds associated with the Hunt circle and thus neutralize the validity of his works within the contemporary cultural sphere. For this purpose, those reviewers employ the following rhetorical strategies. First, they focus on Keats's social status as a lower middle class apothecary in their assaults on his poetry, effectively undermining his credibility as a legitimate poet. Second, they attempt to manipulate the taste of the public by imposing politically and ideologically biased evaluations of literary works upon the reader, presuming that the taste of the general populace is bound to be controlled by superior cultural authorities. As a result of these strategies, the Tory reviewers succeeded in inflicting detrimental impacts on Keats's literary pursuits not only by subjecting him to a series of financial burdens but also by frustrating his original attempt to connect with the public through bis poetic practice. And these detrimental impacts led Keats to develop ambivalent and contradictory attitudes towards the public in his later literary career.