Abstract
Of course, the real question to be answered is why Keats would share the antiquarians’ enthusiasm for Celticism. Why would he be attracted to the history of the Celts in antiquity as well as their history on the British Isles, and from such an early age? Why would a primary source for his poetry from its very beginnings be, as termed by an early twentieth-century anthropologist of the British Isles, “the fairy-faith”?1 His fascination was not solely aesthetic. Celticism in general implied defiance of the present political British status quo. Moreover, Celtic-derived folklore provided him with the quietly held means of resistance to the period’s aristocratic literary establishment that privileged classical learning as an index of breeding and culture. The “fairy-faith” may also have been congenial to his own quicksilver sense of ambiguity and possibility.2 Certainly, allusions to classical mythology run through Keats’s poetry. But so do the closer native myths that, as Celtic scholars believed, were prior in their origins to classicism.
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Notes
W.Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, London: Oxford University Press, 1911.
See Edward Snyder, The Celtic Revival in English Literature, 1760–1800, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923.
This is “still the authority in the field” as of the mid-1990s, according to Sam Smiles, The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994, p. 48. Snyder confines himself to a strictly literary discussion of the influence of Thomas Gray and James Macpherson upon later eighteenth-century writers who wrote in the Ossianic vein.
The “cockney” dialect became a farcical, satirical, or otherwise “humorous” indicator of lower-class characters in plays and novels by the mid-eighteenth century. See William Matthews, Cockney Past and Present: A Short History of the Dialect of London, London: Routledge & Sons, 1938, pp. 31ff.
Gerry Kearns, “Biology, Class and the Urban Penalty,” in Urbanising Britain: Essays on Class and Community in the Nineteenth Century, eds Gerry Kearns and Charles W.J. Withers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 15–16.
John Rule, The Laboring Classes in Early Industrial England 1750–1850, London and New York: Longman, 1986, p. 379.
John Gibson Lockhart’s review of Poems and Endymion (Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, III, July 1818), in The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers, ed. Donald H. Reiman, Part C. Vol. I, New York and London: Garland, 1972, pp. 86–93.
Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997;
and Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Cox’s first chapter (pp. 16–37) admirably gives the literary and political implications of the term “Cockney School.”
Edward John Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author, Vol. I, 1878; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968, p. 39.
Kelvin Everest, “Isabella in the Market-Place: Keats and Feminism,” in Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998, p. 402. Chapter 7 is excellent on the general subject of Keats’s fear of writing “smokeable” poetry.
Murray G.H. Pittock, Celtic Identity and the British Image, Manchester: Manchester University Press and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999, p. 25.
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992, p. 13.
Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 69.
For an excellent discussion of this Romantic shift of emphasis away from classical Greece to the native culture of the ancient Britons, see Laura Doyle, “The Racial Sublime,” in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834, eds Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996, especially pp. 19–26.
The terms “Celtic” and “Gallic” generally were used interchangeably until the eighteenth century. Stuart Piggott, Celts, Saxons, and the Early Antiquaries, O’Donnell Lecture, 1966: Edinburgh, 1967, p. 11, cited in Kidd, p. 189.
Stuart Piggott, Ancient Britons and the Antiquarian Imagination: Ideas from the Renaissance to the Regency, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1989, p. 34.
Miranda J. Green, The World of the Druids, London: Thames and Hudson, 1997, p. 43. Karen J. Harvey notes that the figure of Merlin prevailing in late eighteenth-century popular culture was that of the prophet or seer, which corresponded also to the figure then popularly held of the Druid (p. 88).
Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997, pp. 7–8.
There are several studies of Macpherson that reconsider his creation of Ossian from the viewpoint of the modern Scottish critic interested in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gaelic culture. See Fiona Stafford, The Sublime Savage: A Study of James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988;
Ossian Revisited, ed. Howard Gaskill, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991; and the excellent overview in Fiona Stafford’s Introduction to The Poems of Ossian, pp. v–xxi. See also Journal of American Folklore, Fall 2001, Vol. 114, No. 454, a special issue that is devoted to the contributions of Macpherson to the field of folklore.
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© 2005 Christine Gallant
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Gallant, C. (2005). Romantic Celticism in Context. In: Keats and Romantic Celticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230502499_2
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