'Towards the temple of fame': Class, the classics, and the struggle for distinction in the poetry of John Keats

My dissertation reexamines the role of the Classics in Keats's work. I argue that his middle-class background helped lead him to view the Classics as a way to distinguish himself socio-culturally through poetic achievement. His use of the Classics is on the one hand a response to the upper-class and conservative "tradition" of English poetry - within which he sought to be included and from which he felt alienated because of his class status and political views. On the other hand, the Classics are a critical and competitive means to distinguish his poetry from the radical creations of his literary circle. Keats aimed to earn lasting literary acclaim and to outpace his literary associates, as he himself characterized it, on the path "towards the temple of fame." My argument responds to two major schools of Keatsian criticism. The first reads the poet's employment of classical material as chiefly ornamental. According to this view, Keats, whose education did not include Greek, could maintain only a bourgeois - and thus illegitimate - relationship to the classical tradition. In rejecting this view, I critically engage the second school of criticism (new historical). This school contends that Keats's use of the Classics was part of a politically radical project shared within his literary circle that aimed at subverting the conservatism of the establishment. This view is correct, I argue, in attributing an instrumental function to Keats's classicism. The assumption, however, that his classicism is primarily political is narrow. An exclusively political reading reduces Keats's "Cockney classicism" to an opposition limited to unnuanced "radical" and "conservative" poles. Both the complexity and the influence of socio-poetic tensions within Keats's circle are minimized in favor of this categorization of his circle as seamlessly united. My project explores connections between these tensions and Keats's use of the Classics to provide a more nuanced view of Keats both as an individual poet and as a figure in the Romantic Movement.