Authorizing romanticism: The grounding of poetic authority in the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats (William Wordsworth, John Keats)

Poets of the Romantic period faced a crisis in poetic authority more severe than that experienced by any generation of English authors before them, as the Romantics acknowledged the possibility that poetry itself might have exhausted its resources and thereby reached its end. Wordsworth and Keats in particular reacted to this crisis by trying to establish a new grounding of poetic authority within their poetry, an attempt which they saw as tantamount to a rescuing of English poetry. This attempt to establish secure grounds for poetry informs the subject matter of much of their poetry and offers insight into the features of their poems and into their individual artistic methods. This study investigates how these two authors tried to achieve a firmer basis for poetic discourse within their major poems, particularly in Wordsworth's early works, the 1798 Lyrical Ballads and the 1805 Prelude, and in Keats's major allegorical narratives, Endymion and The Fall of Hyperion. This study also reexamines Wordsworth's important influence upon Keats: Wordsworth was Keats's most important living model, and no study of Keats's poetic authority is complete without an account of Wordsworth's pervasive influence upon him.; Wordsworth and Keats both negatively characterized eighteenth-century poetry, and the initial part of this study revisits the larger debate over eighteenth-century poetry which informed the relations between Wordsworth, Keats, Hunt, and Byron and shows how this debate fueled Byron's antagonism toward Keats. I subsequently demonstrate how Keats took up Wordsworth's early poetic ideal and made it his own, although he inevitably expressed it quite differently in his own poetic productions and transmuted it in his own artistic progress. Both poets wrestled with the paradox of Wordsworth's vision of a poetry grounded in reality itself rather than in the practice of past poets and the examples of specific textual models. Reading these two poets together is a useful check against reading Wordsworth solely according to his own prescriptions. By seeing how one of Wordsworth's best students, Keats, took up Wordsworth and eventually criticized the unifying vision that had initially spurred him on, we are better able to keep Wordsworth grounded as well.