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Robert Gittings once suggestively identified a possible connection between Keats’s circumstances, living in Wentworth Place in the Spring of 1819, and a detail from the ‘Ode to Psyche’. Drawing especially on the Keatsian writings of Michael O’Neill, this essay seeks speculatively to relate the representation of experience in the great odes more generally to the idiosyncratic nature of life in the double-house, shared at first with the Dilkes and then with the Brawne family. It also explores the particular significance of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida within this culminating moment of Keats’s career, and the role of the play in his thinking about the ‘poetical character’ as exemplified in the odes.

De la Mare mattered to Auden throughout his writing life. Initially he served as a model for the fledgling poet, but subsequently he became more important as a guide to taste: de la Mare’s anthology Come Hither was an important and lasting influence on Auden’s sense of the scope and variety of poetry. Later, when Auden himself became a distinguished anthologist, de la Mare’s example was key, shaping the conception of both The Poet’s Tongue and The Oxford Book of Light Verse; and in the selection he made of de la Mare’s verse, later in his life, the elder poet continues to help Auden articulate some of the central concerns of his literary thinking.

Lunch in my college is not normally a time of great enthusiasm, so I was doubly struck when, a few years ago, I found one of my colleagues, a historian, and normally a person of a somewhat austere ...

Coleridge was disappointed in The Excursion, but his disappointment was intricate and fruitful. Wordsworth first came to learn about it through the offices of Lady Beaumont, who, for some inexplicable reason, thought it a good idea to show him a letter she had received from Coleridge which had touched on the subject (April 3, 1815: Griggs IV 564). As is characteristic of his complex discontent with the poem, Coleridge had in fact said very warm things about it: "I can truly say, that one half the number of its Beauties would make all the beauties of all his Contemporary Poets collectively mount to the balance." But, as he went on--while conceding that "the fault may be in my own mind"--"I do not think, I did not feel, it equal to the Work on the Growth of his own spirit." Coleridge is referring, of course, to the autobiographical poem that ultimately became The Prelude, which he had heard recited back in 1807, prompting his own poem "To William Wordsworth," a copy of which he had subsequently sent to Lady Beaumont. (The immediate occasion of his writing to her now was to get hold the poem, of which he apparently had kept no copy: he was collecting his verse into a volume, which would belatedly become Sibylline Leaves and appear in 1817.) Compared with that writing, Coleridge told Lady Beaumont, The Excursion showed no diminution of Wordsworth's "genius"; but there was a problem with it, nevertheless, which had something to do with individuality. The power of Wordsworth's autobiographical poetry lay partly in his ability to capture an experience that was generational, true; but it stemmed, too, from an audacious originality of purpose that was Wordsworth's and no-one else's: "high theme by Thee first sung aright," as Coleridge had put it in the lines to Wordsworth (1.4 Poems 436). The Excursion seemed to have forgone singing themes "aright" for the first time for the less satisfactory task of singing old themes as though they were something new. The new poetry betrayed a kind of philosophical naivete, having convinced himself of the truth of "doctrines and words" that most people take for granted since childhood, Coleridge explained to Lady Beaumont, Wordsworth came to attach an undue "depth and weight" to "doctrines and words, which come almost as Truisms or Common-place to others." He misappropriates generally received wisdoms as hard-won individual insights. No doubt what Coleridge is objecting to here is partly Wordsworth's piety, which looms large in the latter parts of the poem especially. In a long career of admiring Wordsworth, Coleridge never thought much of the quality of Wordsworth's Christianity, which had an unscrutinised ecumenical ease naturally irritating to someone who had wrestled with the Trinity on innumerable dark nights. As far as Wordsworth was concerned, Coleridge evidently shared with his theologically savvy son, Hartley, a distaste for "the odd occasional introduction of the popular, almost the vulgar, Religion in his later publications (the popping in, as Hartley says, of the old man with a beard)," and at one point even admitted "the painful suspicion of worldly prudence" (Letters V 95), as though murmuring solemnly about God were really a matter of what the market demanded. He did not express himself so sharply in his letter to Lady Beaumont, but the sting of his criticism was keen nevertheless. When Wordsworth learned about the letter, he picked up at once on the much broader point at issue: that something good about The Prelude was being compared unfavourably with something wrong in the new poem: "I have rather been perplexed than enlightened by your comparative censure." For one of Wordsworth's main ambitions in The Excursion had been, he told Coleridge, precisely to "put the commonplace truths, of the human affections especially, in an interesting point of view; and rather to remind men of their knowledge, as it lurks inoperative and unvalued in their own minds, than to attempt to convey recondite or refined truths. …

When the spirit of the young John Stuart Mill finally broke, it was reading Wordsworth that helped mend it; and the new thing that Wordsworth brought to Mill's life was chiefly the realisation that things could feel new. Mill's upbringing, as designed and implemented by his father, was an extraordinary experiment in moral philosophy--an extraordinarily rigorous and thoroughly conceived "course of Benthamism" (Mill, Autobiography, 36). The crisis that finally arose, when Mill was twenty, grew from the growing conviction that, in Alan Ryan's words, "he had been manufactured" (Ryan, 33) rather than growing up as a person should; and the feeling of his being manufactured expressed itself in a sense of stifling restriction, as though the scope of human intelligence had been narrowed down to a fraction of its full richness and possibility: "For now I saw, or thought I saw, what I had always before received with incredulity--that the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings: as indeed it has when no other mental habit of cultivated, and the analysing spirit remains without its natural complements and correctives" (Mill, Autobiography, 75). A good part of the malaise lay in the awareness that the freedom and spontaneity of the mind had become reduced to the merely habitual: the salutary influence exerted by reading Wordsworth was the example he offered of a mind freed from the burdens of being customary. In the Autobiography Mill describes a range of beneficial effects exerted by Wordsworth's poetry, but among the most telling is his praise for "the very culture of the feelings": "the delight which these poems gave me, proved that with culture of this sort, there was nothing to dread from the most confirmed habit of analysis." The "Ode," foremost in Mill's recollection, dwelt both upon Wordsworth's awareness of a lost "freshness of youthful enjoyment" and upon the emotional intelligence with which he sought a compensation for that loss; and, as though in emulation, Mill's spirits also began to revive, at once diminished by experience but finally undefeated by it: "The result was that I gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it" (Autobiography, 81; 82). Mill compares his lot to Coleridge's state of "Dejection" ("A grief without a pang, void, dark and, drear": "Dejection: An Ode." 1.21: Coleridge, 393; Mill, Autobiography, 74); and it may well have been thoughts of Coleridge's poem that encouraged Mill to think about his collapse in terms of the stifling habit of his remorseless intellectualism: And haply by abstruse research to steal From my own nature all the natural Man-- This was my sole resource, my only plan: Till that which suits a part infects the whole, And now is almost grown the habit of my Soul. "Dejection: An Ode," 11.89-93) But Mill's antipathy towards the habitual in his Autobiography connects as well with a much wider instinct about habit and custom that repeatedly stirs in his writings. Disabling the mind by enslaving it to conformity with habitual practice or assumption appals all of Mill's progressive instincts. "The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement" (Liberty, 70). Bui more than just politically un-progressive, to lapse into the habitual is to diminish a fuller humanity, which for Mill is importantly related to the capacity to make choices rather than have other people make one's choices: "He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice" (On Liberty, 59). Custom destroys liberty and, with that, individuality: for, as Mill says elsewhere in On Liberty, "individuality should assert itself," so that "[w]here, not the person's own character, but the traditions of customs of other people are the rule of conduct, there is wanting one of the principal ingredients of human happiness, and quite the chief ingredient of individual and social progress" (Mill, On Liberty, 57). …

Everyone knows that a number of important concepts gained a new resonance and prestige around the turn of the nineteenth century: the phenomenon is called (or is symptomatic of what is called) ‘romanticism’; and any account of romanticism's legacies might well choose to consider the continuing life of those new significances within subsequent literary thinking. The terms that matter are words such as art, aesthetic, imagination, literature, poetry; and the intricate pattern of changes in their meanings has been drawn most influentially by Raymond Williams, initially in Culture and Society and then later in Keywords. Where, for instance, art had once meant ‘any human skill’, as Williams says, it became during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century a word with a very specialised and superior sort of reference, evidence of ‘a remarkable change in ideas of the nature and purpose of art, and of its relations to other human activities and to society as a whole’ – the ‘change’ in question being something like a decision to divorce. The story is: art, which had once participated unquestioningly in the main movements of social practice, now became defined by its separateness from that life, and even by an hostility towards it. This divisive change occurs as part of much ‘wider changes in life and thought’, all ways of registering the divisive shock of modern industrial civilisation:1 ‘Clearly’, says Williams, ‘the major shift represented by the modern complex of literature, art, aesthetic, creative and imaginative is a matter of social and cultural history’.2 That history, for Williams, found its most satisfactory account in Marxist terms: ‘a general social activity was forced into the status of a department or province, and actual works of art were in part converted into a self-pleading ideology’ (Culture and Society, 47). Williams himself was not narrowly hostile to a Romantic emphasis on human ‘creativity’; and Coleridge is actually handled very sympathetically in Culture and Society. But it is not difficult to see how the association of a Romantic vocabulary with deplorable political change might be construed as a brand of complicity, and the ostensible distance of that aesthetic language from questions of real politics as a kind of deceit, the institutions of art but agents of bad ideology. Terry Eagleton, Williams's most eminent pupil, is usefully outspoken in this line: the aesthetic, he says, serves as the type of the new ‘bourgeois subject’, who is ‘autonomous and self-determining [and] acknowledges no merely extrinsic law but instead, in some mysterious fashion, gives the law to itself’.3 That is practically a paraphrase of Coleridge's description of the organic form possessed by great works of the imagination: for Coleridge, a Shakespeare play does not obey any rules from without, as does a work by Racine, but grows instead according to an inward law, ‘a law which all the parts obey[,] conforming themselves to the outward symbols & manifestations of the essential principle’.4 A work of art, in the new Romantic sense, is for Eagleton ‘a model of free, self-referential, autotelic, autoaffective being’: which is how capitalism makes the bourgeois subject think about himself.5 But all such pretensions are spurious, as it is needless to say: ‘literature is an illusion’, Eagleton wrote in his best-selling Literary Theory; and the task of the critic then becomes to expose that illusoriness, so returning works of ‘literature’ to ‘the social purposes and conditions in which they were embedded’.6

"A shilling life will give you all the facts." The note of knowing scorn in the opening line of Auden's sonnet "Who's Who" (Collected Poems 126) suggests, not that facts are wrong exactly, but that the only facts you are ever likely to establish in the public realm ("how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night") are bound to disappoint and never bring you? very close to who's really who. But the poem is far from against facts per se, and with the turn of the sonnet it turns toward the kind of fact that, were it knowable, would tell you just what you want to know. But these are private realities that the archives are never going to disclose: he sighed for one Who, say astonished critics, lived at home; Did little jobs about the house with skill And nothing else; could whistle; would sit still Or potter round the garden ... Those lines are poignantly invested with the rapt enchantment that domestic routine usually enjoys in Auden's poetry: here, a life of unremarkable detail, far too dull to find a place in the records, and inaudibly subversive of the grander myths which normally order the lives of Great Men. Auden later paid sombre homage to Clio, Muse of History, who bears witness to such exceptional yet unremarkable truths: "Muse of the unique--Historical fact" (Collected Poems 612); but the circumstantial charm of unique, riddling, inassimilable facts had long entranced his verse in a much less august style. Well? As a matter of fact the farm was in Pembrokeshire ... (English Auden 87) The feel of a fact enters the poetry as an unmitigated non sequitur, at once comical and weirdly off-putting--"a piece of horrible photography," thought Empson, "and I remember shuddering as I first set eyes on it" (Empson 98). Auden's attachment to such uncompromising matters of fact, whether reverent or darkly amused, might feel like a good example of his anti-Romanticism--or, to put that another way, a good example of his modernism, sharing the principled suspicion of imagination and its excesses that prompted Eliot, for example, to insist upon the proper primacy of "a very highly developed sense of fact" (Eliot, 31). (1) For one "Romantic" attitude toward facts is very well known, and may even appear definitive. "Facts--stubborn facts!--none of your Theory" Coleridge once wrote in his notebook, "A most entertaining & instructive Essay--the sooner the better" (Notebooks iii.3737). Like many Coleridgean, projects the sooner done the better, that one was never, in fact, done; but many of the works that did get written instead communicate well enough his hostility, rejecting that reverence for the unmediated fact which (as Coleridge saw matters) had so corrupted modern intellectual life. "To attempt to argue any great question upon facts only, is absurd," Coleridge was reported table-talking: "you cannot state any fact before a mixed audience, which an opponent as clever as yourself cannot with ease twist towards another bearing, or at least meet by a contrary fact, as it is called. I wonder why facts were ever called stubborn things... Facts, you know, are not truths" (Table Talk ii.154). The uneducated rustic, according to Coleridge in Biographia Literaria, is the sort of person who deals in "insulated facts"; the wise man is the one to whom "facts are valuable ... chiefly as they lead to the discovery of the indwelling law, which is true being of things" (Biographia ii.52; 53). Sceptical Hazlitt doubtless had Coleridge in mind when he diagnosed the shortcomings of poets outside the airy world of their lyrics: "When they light upon the ground of prose and matter-of-fact, they seem not to have the same use of their feet" (Hazlitt xii.5). Coleridge was an idealist--an "extreme Idealist", I.A. Richards once called him (Richards, Coleridge 19). And no idealist can easily afford to make too much of facts because of what feels to be their defining attribute--that which ensures their factuality: namely, the sheer, intransigent, unique givenness of them. …

(2003). Ordinary consolation and its modern fate. European Romantic Review: Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 479-486.

By "Wordsworth's Heroics," I do not mean the heroism of Wordsworth's life, which was often very great, but the heroism of his poetry; or rather, the way his poetry dealt with an idea of the poetically heroic that he inherited from his eighteenth-century forbears. I suppose that now no one speaks unguardedly, as once they did, of Wordsworth's rejection of "the eighteenth century"; but what sense we make of the continuities depends on what idea we entertain of that handy fabrication, "the eighteenth century." Ever since (if not before) David Nichol Smith quoted a passage of Akenside in his preface to The Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse (1926) and remarked its similarity to Wordsworth, we have been aware of connections between The Prelude, say, and the tradition of deistic verse-philosophising represented by Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination and Thomson's Seasons. But I want to look away from the metaphysical respectabilities of that Miltonic line and toward what might seem the less salubrious mode of the mock-heroic. Mock-heroic is not peculiar to the eighteenth century (think of the Nun's Priest's Tale) but it does seem a cast of literary mind which found the eighteenth century especially hospitable: perhaps because, as David Fairer has cleverly speculated, the juxtaposition of incongruous elements which mock-heroic thrives upon appeared so nicely to exemplify life in the new Lockean mind, where "one idea was no bigger than another" (Fairer 50). Anyway, fascination with the mode during the eighteenth century is universally acknowledged; and I think that Wordsworth was enough of an eighteenth-century poet to find it compelling too, though the results were usually more oblique than the run of Augustan examples. Indeed it would often be perverse to claim Wordsworth's poems as examples of mock-heroic any more, I agree; but I think the link is real for all that: Wordsworth took the raw ingredients of the idiom and transformed them astonishingly. I should begin with an uncontentious example from the first part of the 1799 Prelude, written when William and Dorothy were in Germany, about to freeze in the coldest winter of the century. Wordsworth is summoning resources before embarking on the vast philosophical epic The Recluse, a commission which Coleridge has spent the Spring enthusiastically pressing on him; and, to gather himself for the task ahead, Wordsworth returns in memory to his childhood, which is where he locates the springs of those imaginative powers that are presently going to see him through the task. Odd incidents suggest themselves: he remembers bathing in the Derwent, trap-robbing, taking eggs from ravens' nests, stealing a shepherd's boat; and he remembers skating on the frozen lakes - a memory called to mind, perhaps, by the wintry weather he was currently enduring in Germany. He apostrophises the presences of nature who have (as he hopes to think) presided over the educational regime that has equipped him so well for the work to come; and then, in a very remarkable transition, the style of apprehension alters to a different mode, from pantheist rapture to something like affectionate social comedy, before modulating back to the numinous wintry sublime again. I would record with no reluctant voice Our home amusements by the warm peat fire At evening, when with pencil and with slate, In square divisions parcelled out, and all With crosses and with cyphers scribbled o'er, We schemed and puzzled, head opposed to head, In strife too humble to be named in verse "Or," he continues, they crowded "round the naked table": And to the combat--lu or whist--led on A thick-ribbed army, not as in the world Discarded and ungratefully thrown by Even for the very service they had wrought, But husbanded through many a long campaign, Oh, with what echoes on the board they fell-Ironic diamonds, hearts of sable hue, Queens gleaming through their splendour's last decay, Knaves wrapt in one assimilating gloom, And kings indignant at the shame incurred By royal visages. …

This chapter has seven sections: 1. General; 2. Poetry (excluding Blake and women poets); 3. Women Poets; 4. William Blake; 5. Prose Fiction; 6. Non-Fictional Prose; 7. Drama. Section 1 is by Orianne Smith; section 2 is by Matthew Scott; section 3 is by Ana Alicia Garza; section 4 is by Jason Whittaker; section 5 is by Felicity James; section 6 is by Gavin Budge; section 7 is by Amy Muse.