“Jack a Lanthern” Verse: Of Pots and Precursors and Poetic Value in Isabella

Abstract

Isabella, or the Pot of Basil offers Keats’s most detailed and complex allegory of poetic reception and influence. It is an allegory fraught with anxiety, Rzepka argues, but not, like Harold Bloom’s, an anxiety over precursors like Boccaccio. Instead, the poem represents an allegorical working out of Keats’s anxieties at having to disseminate his poems in a modern market economy that transforms all works of art, including poems, from gifts into commodities. This transformation was necessary, Keats came to realize, if his work was to circulate beyond the limited arena of reception comprising family and friends. Adding to these anxieties was the poet’s dawning recognition that the path to commercial success lay through the minds and hearts of female readers.

I am sometimes so very sceptical as to think Poetry itself a mere Jack a lanthern to amuse whoever may chance to be struck with its brilliance—As tradesmen say everything is worth what it will fetch, so probably every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer—being in itself a Nothing. (Letters 1: 242)

—To Benjamin Bailey, 13 March 1818