The cambridge companion to british roman 287

Romantic poets and contemporary poetry

literary reception as involving a “willing suspension of disbelief” (in
Coleridge’s famous phrase); the uncanny idea that, as Shelley argues in his
A Defence of Poetry, poetry makes the familiar strange; and, perhaps most
importantly, the equally uncanny possibility that what is most powerful and
strange, most powerfully strange, about poetry is that it is just the crafted
deployment of “ordinary” language – that poetry is a “selection of the language”, as Wordsworth puts it, “really used by men.”6
But if Romanticism is, therefore, often in only vaguely defined and barely
acknowledged ways, part of the “air we breathe,” part of the way that we
conceive of poetry, it is also more directly and more explicitly a source of
poetic material. And one of the most interesting ways that readers, critics,
and poets have directly engaged with Romantic poetry over recent decades
has been to blur the distinction between writer and writing, between poet
and poem. One way to approach the question of the significance of Romantic
poetry in contemporary culture is to examine the often rather contradictory
ways in which contemporary poets directly express their interest in, as well
as their distance from and resistance to, the lives as well as the work of their
eminent predecessors.
John Keats’s afterlives
John Keats is the Romantic poet who is perhaps most often and most
intimately evoked by contemporary poets, just as it was Keats, along with
Shelley, who was most often mourned and memorialized in nineteenthcentury poems.7 And what is most striking about contemporary evocations
of Keats is the intensity with which they often figure a particular kind of affiliation and even personal identification, however guarded, with the youthful
poet. “I think I half believed I was him,” Anne Stevenson comments of
her first encounter with the poet’s work in Miss McKinney’s twelfth grade
English class in 1950, in “John Keats, 1821–1950” (2000).8 Although the
American writer Constance Urdang declares in her poem “Keats’ (1990) that
“It isn’t Keats I love but the incorruptible / Purity of his words,”9 contemporary poets tend nevertheless to recall Keats on account of his tragically
curtailed life as much as on account of his writing, or of what Tom Clark calls
his “intense language drive.”10 Keats’s life, of course, lends itself to retelling

on account of the way that it constitutes a particular kind of “allegory”11 –
the allegory of the fate of poetic genius and the poet’s suffering, neglect, and
necessarily early death. Keats instantiates, in other words, the very being
of the poet or at least a certain archetype or ideal of the poet that we have
inherited and in some ways still cling to, albeit in somewhat attenuated form:
what we have inherited from Keats and others is one of the dominant senses
265
Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008