Rice University

Keats and Social Context: Lamia

Author(s): Terence Allan Hoagwood
Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 29, No. 4, Nineteenth Century (Autumn,
1989), pp. 675-697
Published by: Rice University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/450606 .
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 SEL 29(1989)
ISSN 0039-3657

Keats and Social Context: Lamia

TERENCE ALLAN HOAGWOOD

Oh private head, I love your small size,

I love your shrinking thinking.
-Reed Whittemore

Practical criticism founded on a social-historical theory is still

relatively unusual in studies of Keats: thematic approaches and
text-based methods of formalism remain dominant (with excep-
tions that I shall be discussing below). What results are interpreta-
tions of particular poems, or sets of poems. An argument about
method can open a different hermeneutic field. So long as the
questions we ask of critical works are themselves written within
one critical school, then commentary on a particular poem will be
subject to that school's parameters.
The present essay therefore constitutes an argument about
criticism, in order to open a new range of subsequent commentary.
I offer at the end of this essay a commentary on Lamia as an
example of the kind of practical interpretation that a historical
method can engender; but the space for that kind of commentary
must first be opened by an argument about interpretation. To
analyze present and past studies of Keats is to discern some
assumptions and convictions that limit and predetermine inter-
pretive conclusions. To define these problematic and limiting
assumptions is to clear space for alternative approaches. Hege-
monic convictions reign in part by virtue of their invisibility; local
customs have a way of looking like universal laws of nature, or
common sense. To define the limits of currently dominant
assumptions in Keats criticism, or in studies of Romanticism, can
(negatively) alienate those assumptions, distancing and relativizing
them; it can also (positively) generate constructive alternatives.

Terence Allan Hoagwood's books include Skepticism and Ideology:

Shelley's Political Prose and Its Philosophical Context from Bacon to Marx
(1988) and Prophecy and the Philosophy of Mind: Traditions of Blake and
Shelley (1985). His current book-length projects include both a study of
Romantic ideology and the philosophy of symbolic form and also a volume of
essays on Romantic drama which he is coediting with Daniel P. Watkins.

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676 L A MI A

The commentary on Lamia with which this essay will end is

designed to show how hermeneutic analysis can and does open
onto specifically practical criticism. This design does not reduce
the poem to the status of an indifferent example, but discloses
different sets of meanings within the poem itself, by approaching
it through a different interpretive frame. To begin with the specific
commentary, however, would work against such an aim: to do so
requires silently presupposing a host of assumptions and convic-
tions, however consensual, which it may well be time, in Keats
studies, to examine directly.
A body of commentary has grown around Keats's poems that
organizes its own interpretive fictions. Critical literature character-
istically produces and reproduces its own codes of meaning and
value; this procedure effectively rewrites poems for twentieth-
century consumption.1 In contrast, a historical method takes
account of a poem's reception history as well as its production
history; what a poem has been understood to mean, in the past,
affects what a reader now takes the poem to be.2 Accordingly, a
historical method would "foreground the interpretive categories or
codes through which we read and receive the text."3 In a useful
preliminary mode of argument, then, "our object of study is less
the text itself than the interpretations through which we attempt to
confront and appropriate it."4 What follows is first meant to be
such a metacommentary, a polemical account of method; its
polemical character does not arise from a contention that this or
that critic is "wrong," in contrast to an alternative which is
"right." The metacommentary aims rather to clarify interpretive
issues and to define a hermeneutic field. The commentaries that
then follow, contextual and analytic, take their place in the
framework of historical theory that I take as such a hermeneutic
field. Part of my argument is that more traditional studies have
already, and always had, such a hermeneutic field; what distin-
guishes the kind of argument here proposed is that it examines
directly and openly what those (unargued) presuppositions have
been.

I
Georg Lukacs articulates aphoristically a historicist assumption
that lies behind many subsequent studies of narrative, and which
will serve well in an analysis of Keats's poetic narrative, Lamia:

every action, thought and emotion of human beings is

inseparably bound up with the life and struggles of the
community, i.e., with politics; whether the humans them-
selves are conscious of this, unconscious of it or even trying

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 TERENCE ALLAN HOAGWOOD 677

to escape from it, objectively their actions, thoughts and

emotions nevertheless spring from and run into politics.5

Jameson, for example, follows Lukacs when he argues that "there

is nothing that is not social and historical . .. everything is 'in the
last analysis' political."6 Obviously, Jameson's concept of "politi-
cal unconscious" is not what is normally meant by "political,"
which would involve conscious motives. I take the words "social,"
"historical," and "unconscious" to imply a range of meanings
beneath and beyond the consciously "political" meanings of, for
example, topical or polemical works. With rare exceptions,
literary criticism of Keats has not been much concerned with these
larger ranges of social and historical meanings. McGann is nearly
alone in arguing that, as poems "are human acts occupying social
space," it follows that "poetry [including Keats's poetry] is itself
one form of social activity."7 Whether we accept his polemical
account of the Lamia volume or not, we should find it easy to read
the following statement about Keats's book as a description of
Keats's critics, and of the interpretive acts that have become
conventional:

The Lamia volume represented Keats's effort to show his

readers how they might, by entering his poetic space, step
aside from the conflicts and tensions which were so marked
an aspect of the period. The whole point of Keats's great
and (politically) reactionary book was not to enlist poetry
in the service of social and political causes-which is what
Byron and Shelley were doing-but to dissolve social and
political conflicts in the mediations of art and beauty.8

I would argue that conventional criticism has performed that

evasion, rewriting the document, Lamia, to evade its presentation
of social conflicts. The poem expresses social and political
conflicts, not because it is a political or topical poem, but because
large-scale social realities affect the way the poem presents its story.
Traditional interpretations transcode the poem, to tell a story of
private and mental terms; a historical interpretation may restore
meanings beyond the mental, personal, and abstract points of
reference that tend to be preferred in much traditional criticism.
Again, McGann has described the relevant interpretive operation,
treating as a feature of Romantic poems an ideological maneuver
that in fact comes to maturity in modern interpretations of that
poetry: "The poetry of Romanticism is everywhere marked by
extreme forms of displacement and poetic conceptualizations
whereby the actual human issues with which the poetry is

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678 LA MIA

concerned are resituated in a variety of idealized localities."9 The

"actual human issues" involve a "larger, predominating ideo-
logical context." 10 It is the structure of social relations, and not
mere particular "facts" which Keats's poem encodes. In Raymond
Williams's words, historical materialism enables us to read poems
critically, "as reflecting not separated objects and superficial
events but the essential forces and movements underlying them." "
At the ideological level, to decode a poem like Lamia as though it
were referentially about a political event or personage would be a
reductive mistake: the more important social content of any work
of art is rather a system of meanings and values, a hegemonic
"structure of feeling."12 The Romantic illusion that McGann
explains is the interpreter's blindness to the ideological and
political content of these structures of feeling, encoded in aesthetic
and conceptual form.'3
An opposite but equal blindness would obscure the poem's
specificity by absorbing it solely to political meanings; as a poem
shares its cultural world with many other poems, differences
among poems can seem to be erased by a wholesale absorption in
ideological undercurrents. The danger, however, which seems to
me greater in Keats criticism as it has come to us over the years, is
that sensitivity to poetic individuality may have obscured some of
the larger or more social determinants and implications of Keats's
poems.
Lamia engages centrally and problematically one ideological
crux that, in modern commentaries on the poem, has been
translated to a principle of a "basic bourgeois theory of literature":
this is the "characteristic separation of 'individual' and 'society.' "14
Briefly, traditional criticism of Lamia (of which I shall be
analyzing some examples below) has understood the poem as a tale
about the dichotomy of (private) illusion and (external or public)
reality, including a supposed opposition of "individual" and
"society." Approached from an interpretive standpoint apart from
this privatized and individualistic assumption, however, Lamia
can be seen to display already a principle of historicist theory.
Again I quote Williams: "Thinking which begins from such
categories [as 'individual' and 'society'], and then moves to the
construction of theories of value around one or other projected
pole, fails to give adequate recognition to the constantly interactive
and in this sense dialectical process, which is real practice."15
Modern interpretations of Lamia frequently execute exactly that
reductive error: the poem Lamia, and within it Lycius's illusion of
Lamia, are treated as private illusions set against an external and
public "reality" of physical nature and a society of corporeal,
mortal persons.'6 In opposition to just such a dichotomy, Keats's

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 TERENCE ALLAN HOAGWOOD 679

poem implies that the private discourse of illusion is always

produced by and within a social reality; individual and society are
concentric, not polar; what are opposites, according to idealist and
individualist interpretive fictions (individual over here, and society
over there), constitute instead a social circumference and, among
the entities included within it, the private experience of illusion.
In V. N. Volosinov's words, "consciousness [including illusion]
takes shape and being in the material of signs created by an
organized group in the process of its social intercourse"; "Lan-
guage acquires life and historically evolves precisely here, in
concrete verbal communication, and not in the abstract linguistic
system of language forms, nor in the individual psyche of
speakers."'17 Lamia situates the language of illusion within its
originating social frame, and it internalizes the structure and
conflicts of that determining historical context.
R. H. Fogle's 1974 essay on Lamia is an excellent example of the
mentalistic and individualistic approach to Keats. Such criticism
replaces the determining social context in Keats's poems with a
polarity of a public reality and a private head. Fogle begins with
his own version of a Coleridgean theory of dramatic illusion: "The
total effect of a work is a collaboration between the poet and his
reader." Dispensing at the outset with the relevance or even the
existence of extrapoetic structures, Fogle transposes his description
of art into a description of Lamia: "both Lamia and Lamia are
illusions"; having thus enclosed not only the character but the
veritable poem itself within the private space of a private head,
Fogle transposes his principle again, this time from the language
of description to explicit value judgment: "What is most important
... is the skill of the poet in stimulating his reader to bring fully
into life what he (the poet) has partially provided, or has been able
to suggest." Criticism of this kind not only singles out the aspects
of the poem that concern private mentality; it positively prefers
them as "what is most important," thereby erasing whole ranges of
the poem's more social meanings. The telos of the poetic project,
like its origin, is defined as a cul de sac in the privacy of an
individual reader's mind.
An approach like Volosinov's, however, suggests an alternative
description: against the assertion that the poem is an illusion for
purely private delectation, such an approach leads to the recogni-
tion that Fogle's judgment already includes other judgments, and
these prior judgments entail extrinsic relations. "Truth" and
"illusion" cannot be dichotomous if we do not first posit both of
them: unless we place the poem against an extrapoetic structure, it
cannot be perceived as an illusion. Lamia (whose alluring beauty
disguises her prior form as serpent) is an illusion to Lycius, who

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680 L A M IA

loves her in private and then dies when faced with extrasubjective
verities. It may be, as Fogle says, that the entire poem constitutes
an illusion for its reader, to the extent that the reader is uncritically
absorbed in the poem's representations; but to judge Lamia or
Lamia as illusions is to presuppose truths against which they are
definable. The critic's insistence on the privacy of the reader's
head, which entertains these beautiful or frightening dreams,
masks a superior and antecedent awareness of a public or external
or "real" world. The spheres of meaning (public and private) and
the points of reference (individual and society) can be understood
without rigid dualism: a dialectical view would see them as
interactive, as terms in motion rather than bipolar opposites.
In that sense, the dichotomizing of truth and illusion belies the
autonomy of illusion: reality and private dream include one
another, involve one another at every point. Earl R. Wasserman,
David Perkins, Walter Jackson Bate, and a consensus of Keats
critics observe aptly that the poem embeds illusion, treating it
explicitly and critically; but it does not follow that the poem is (or
could be) an utter illusion itself, suitable for private consumption.
It arises in a social and historical world, and subsequently exists
utterly in that world, in the process of what is called "reception
history."
A poem's (linguistic) forms of utterance and its (cognitive)
structures of judgment already exist before the poem; the argument
that I am making here does not, therefore, depend upon authorial
intention. Inscribed in a language which he uses but which he
cannot meaningfully be said to choose are judgments that Keats
does not necessarily mean. Language "is involved from the
beginning in all other human social and material activity,"18 and
this involvement does not require an individual author's private
intentions. A language imposes cognitive frames, within whose
limits a given utterance-poetic or otherwise-finds its terms.
Because prior decisions inhere in the predetermined language, that
language bears its structures into every utterance, shaping and
limiting the available frames of judgment. Private (authorial)
intention does not exhaust the meanings of a statement or a text.
This argument for the cultural predeterminations of language
and judgment does not, however, legitimately imply the dogmatic
and narrowly political conclusions with which it has sometimes
been associated, as in Stalinist forms of Marxist thought. To
observe that language and judgment are predetermined is not to
show that social class membership is what has determined them.
Some of a poem's dimensions arise from its real-world social and
historical situation, whether or not it is knowingly aimed at
political ends. To say so, however, is not to make the dogmatic

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 TERENCE ALLAN HOAGWOOD 681

claim that the poem is only its political intent, nor that cultural
determinants are conscious intentions, whether personal or class
intentions. To proceed from the claim that some of a poem's
meanings are culturally determined to the different claim that
politics, or class, or gender, or the id, or economics is what has
determined them is a dogmatism unwarranted by the logic of the
argument.
Where differentiations among poems and poets are most keenly
apparent involves often the more specifically aesthetic range of
choices in which intentions and individual determinations of
purpose do account for differences. The generic (epic) commitment
of the Hyperion poems, for example, against the romance back-
ground of Lamia, amounts to a formal decision whose meanings
can be sought in poetic and intentional terms. Within, around,
and beneath these specifically authorial intentions and specifically
textual differentiations there are, all the while, other matters and
meanings of a different order, arising from the social, cultural, and
historical world in which those choices take place. Criticism can
balance or supplement the individual and text-based differenti-
ations with an awareness of culture-based structures of meaning.
Such criticism need not deny the reality or value of discriminations
effected by poetic craft; but a sensitivity to distinguishing features
of particular poems need not obscure the historical meanings
(personally intended or not) that arise from the poem's social
world.
The ideological structure of Keats's poem is not, therefore,
wholly a matter of his personal choices. Two recent studies have
continued the traditional procedures that obscure this fact, and in
entirely conventional ways: first, by enclosing the poem's origin
and end within the limits of personal intention, and then by
translating the poem's issues and engagements into abstract and
idealist terms. Susan J. Wolfson introduces the poem's reception
history into her account of the narrative's conflicts and tensions;
this procedure is executed in such a way, however, that it serves not
to contextualize the poem in its (extra-subjective) world, but rather
to translate those concrete social pressures into yet more person-
alistic abstractions: "Still stung by the reviews of Endymion, after
which [Keats] compared his passive audience to 'vile spectators at
the Westminster cock-pit' he pretends that this will be the very
poem to please them.... But behind such outward hostility lies a
private and more pained ambivalence about the mind's expendi-
tures of energy in the creation of poetry." For Wolfson, this alleged
private concern links Lamia with The Fall of Hyperion in ways
that return the interpretation to the enclosure of the private head,
recalling the procedures I have pointed out in Fogle's earlier

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682 LA M IA

reading: "The protagonist is the author; the terrain is the mind;

the action, a stern interrogation, which leads to a particularly
relevant test for the.poet as reader." 19
In fact, the critical hostility against the Endymion volume
involved political conflict; the Hunt circle's political radicalism,
rather than purely and safely stylistic preferences, enflamed
critiques of the Cockney school, to some of which Keats's volume
was a victim. The Reform movement's highly visible political
struggles, with almost weekly outbreaks of violence, lay behind the
hostile reviews. By 1820 these conflicts had only intensified, the
Manchester massacre being one example. In the case of the Lamia
volume, sensitivities to "the public" did play an important part,
for Keats and also for the book's publishers, Taylor and Hessey.
But to place Lamia against this motivating background is to be
startled at the reductive privacy of Wolfson's own conclusions: in
Lamia, Keats shows himself "scornful of the literary marketplace";
"For both Keats and Wordsworth, sneering at the 'herd' inspires a
Miltonic zeal."20 This elitist and privatized attitude reiterates the
dual limits of personal privacy and mental abstraction. It also runs
counter to the highly politicized character of Keats's publishing
context, his social circle, and the documentary evidence of the
period in which he is working and to which he responds.
Wolfson's statement also depoliticizes Milton in ways that run
afoul of the Romantic response to that poet. Like Fogle's, this
variety of criticism exists to suppress the historicity and therefore
the social engagements of Keats's poems, displacing them through
a conventional transcoding operation into the mythology of a
private head and its merely abstract concerns.
Published in the same year as Wolfson's study, Charles J.
Rzepka's The Self as Mind exhibits an approach that is only
apparently different, in fact setting out from the same essentialist
and individualist assumptions, and roundly ending with them.
For Rzepka, the ostensible introduction of a reality principle
involves not reception history (as in Wolfson's maneuver) but
rather a thematized idea of "reality": "The waking dream of beauty
can be prolonged, intensified, made as 'real' as 'the dreams of
Gods' (Lamia I, 127), if the dreamer can find a real source of
acknowledgement outside his own mind, a lover who corroborates
both the dreamer's dream and his ideal self-representation
therein."21 This privileging of what is "real" is only apparent, as
Rzepka's argument subsequently makes obvious: "Keats tries to
determine the extent to which the theatrical self, the self as
'picture,' artifice, or effect, can be made to prevail in the eyes of the
world and become a part of public, consensual reality. In all this
posing, however, there remains the true self."22 First, I would

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 TERENCE ALLAN HOAGWOOD 683

point out again that the distinction Rzepka treats as absolute-

"public, consensual reality" distinguished from "self"-can be
understood as a dualistic illusion. The self, especially the "the-
atrical" or conventional self, is constituted in a social frame in the
first place. Consciousness "takes shape and being" in a form
"created by an organized group in the process of its social
intercourse." The self, in other words, is an element in the social
frame, not an entity outside it. Language ("practical conscious-
ness," as Williams calls it) is a social product, and this language
constitutes the self. The energy or entity that is called a self is thus
first and last a social product; thinking, imagining, perceiving,
and carrying on discourse are all of them social processes.23
A mode of argument that would erase this verbal and conven-
tional constitution of the self, of the mind, or of the "self as
mind," simply launches its own interpretive fiction. Keats's poem
projects a dialectical or interactive relationship; the traditional
hermeneutic assumes instead a dualism of opposites. In this way,
the critic's assumptions about human reality intervene like a filter
to change the poem's meanings; the commentary on the dialectical
poem becomes rather a rewriting of it, as a story of dualism.
To perceive the essential fictionality of interpretations like
Rzepka's, or the extent to which such interpretations encode the
critic's assumptions, rather than to analyze the "text," is to open a
critical perspective on all of the terms in Rzepka's own allegorical
master narrative.24 The interpretive fiction tells us virtually
nothing about Lamia, or about Keats, but much about the
"bourgeois theory of literature" (in Williams's phrase for it) that
such an interpretation exemplifies.25 To analyze such a critical
fiction can also show us something of how such ideologically
invested transcodings operate: for example, once we see how
Rzepka allegorizes "self" in opposition to "public, consensual
reality," we can see how his conclusions are a mere repetition of
his premises-the "true self" and "his own mind" at which
Rzepka arrives are in fact repetitions of the (blind) assumptions
that served as his (unspoken) starting-point.
Further, the dualism that was offered as a neutral description
swiftly becomes a value judgment: almost always, "individual"
and "society" (or "self" and "reality") are dualized only because an
interpreter would prefer one to the other. In Rzepka's case,
"Struggling for a sense of reality independent of all that others
make of it, the true self feels betrayed both by the 'sentimental
farce' of society and ... by the 'theatrical' relationship as well."26 If
we were to reflect on it, this valorizing of "self" at the expense of
"society" might strike us as paradoxical in an argument that began
by preferring the "real" as "outside his own mind." But text-based

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684 LA MIA

commentaries seldom notice the assumptions about human reality

which, I am arguing, they nevertheless deploy.
In the passage that I have just quoted, Rzepka speaks of Keats's
letter to George and Georgiana Keats (14-31 October 1818), in
which the poet describes Jane Cox in "theatrical" terms. Rzepka
does not mention the fact that this letter goes on to its larger topic:
"the long and continued Peace of England itself has given us
notions of personal safety which are likely to prevent the reestab-
lishment of our national Honesty-there is of a truth nothing
manly or sterling in any part of the Government." Further, "as for
Politics . . . they . . . will soon be too wide awake."27
The falsehood or fictionality of society, its status as theatrical
illusion, is emphatically not a matter of "social" reality existing in
opposition to the "true self," in the abstract terms that constitute
Rzepka's story; it is rather a condition of a political reality of
which Keats is here critical, a reality that involves the reactionary
response of the Regency government to the Reform movement, to
which I shall turn shortly. To render "society" as an abstract idea
is to falsify Keats's concrete frame of reference; it is to tell Rzepka's
story, which is also Wolfson's story, and Fogle's, but it is not to tell
Keats's. Keats's terms are not metaphysical; they are political, and
he names in this letter Leigh Hunt, Sir Francis Burdett, and
Napoleon. I emphasize that the text here under discussion is
Keats's letter; I do not argue that Lamia is explicitly concerned
with this level of politics, but that the context of its composition is
politically specific.
When Rzepka (again, I point to him as an example of conven-
tional criticism, rather than a unique case) writes most empha-
tically of "reality," he has already idealized his own points of
reference so that it is abstract dualism that he offers as the "real."
Apollonius "bears witness to the reality, the facts of the matter . . .
denouncing an illusion that all conspire to make true, forcing the
actors to revert to their real characters."28 Not only does "real" =
"true self," as ever in idealist criticism, but the "facts of the
matter" are only illusions in a fiction. This is dualism but not
dialectic, flattening the tale's interactions and contradictions into
a polarity, Apollonius being right and Lycius wrong.29 Keats's
management of oppositions is, as I shall be arguing below, far
more sophisticated than this mechanical dualism, with its allegedly
permanent solutions, would imply.
The thematizing criticism of Rzepka and Wolfson could be said
to constitute one direction of development from Stillinger's 1971
essay, "'The Heart and Nature of Man,'" in which Stillinger
approaches Lamia in these terms:

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 TERENCE ALLAN HOAGWOOD 685

the poem serves well to introduce the basic Keatsian

conflict between mundane reality and some extra-worldly
ideal state. The opposition is clearer in this poem than in
any other, and it is not resolved. ... As a deadlock in the
conflict between reality and an ideal [the ending of Lamia]
represents in the 1820 volume a starting point of massive
irresolution.30

Stillinger's essay usefully points out that Lamia, "a symbol of the
human investment in a visionary ideal," "rightly deserves ex-
posure"; a human being "cannot entirely forswear 'the noisy
world.'" But when a thematizing criticism treats "the noisy
world" as another abstraction, as an idea within the poem, as
Wolfson and Rzepka do, then that criticism is still idealizing, still
trafficking in a segregated and idealist space.
The noisy world is not written by Keats; the noisy world includes
Keats. Lamia does not contain social or "public, consensual
reality"; rather, social reality contains Lamia. It is a historical
criticism, of the kind McGann recommends, onto which the
critique of illusion can more fruitfully open (though McGann
writes not of Lamia but rather "To Autumn" and "La Belle
Dame"). Such a criticism begins with the world of the poem,
understood in a historicist rather than phenomenological sense-
not as a figment projected within the poem, but rather a historical
reality that conditions, determines, and produces that poem itself.

II
What was happening in the summer and early autumn of 1819,
when Keats was composing Lamia, is germane in at least two sorts
of ways: first, events that have no efficacy at all in determining the
poem might nevertheless share with it certain patterns, preoccupa-
tions, and conflicts. Larger ideological issues, some of which tend
to be salient in particular periods, reproduce themselves on many
levels, even where no single instance can be said to cause another.
The larger ideological pattern is sometimes called a structure, as in
Louis Althusser's account of the Marxist concept of Darstellung:
Althusser suggests that one need not look for causality, in
accounting for the determining power of social structure:

The absence of the cause . . . is the very form of the

interiority of the structure, as a structure, in its effects....
This implies therefore that the effects are not outside the
structure, are not a pre-existing object, element or space in
which the structure arrives to imprint its mark: on the
contrary, it implies that the structure is immanent in its
effects.3'

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686 LA MIA

A king, priest, father, or husband, for example, can instantiate or

represent (darstellen) tyranny. On a social level, a dynamic of
suppression can incarcerate a criminal; in a psychological mode,
the same structure of suppression can manifest itself in the
silencing of a wish. The structure that is visible in the firing of
rifles into a crowd can be equally apparent in another setting in
the lowering of voices when certain subjects are broached. Sim-
ilarly, patterns of thought, feeling, and social conflict can enter or
condition contemporaneous poetic products, whether or not those
poetic works name them; still less is it relevant to demand that the
poem be referentially about a recognizable and historically salient
structure of thought and relations; the poem can manifest a
structure whether or not it is about that structure, in that
referential sense.
Secondarily, however, some events and forces do of course
determine directly the content and form of poetic products. For
example, Keats writes to Reynolds on 11 July that, for Lamia, he
has "great hopes of success"; he writes to George and Georgiana
Keats that the poem "must take hold of people in some way"; to
Woodhouse (in September) he confesses that Isabella is "weak-
sided" in relation to what he calls "the Public"; "There is no
objection of this kind to Lamia."32 Another form of the externally
conditioned pressure on the Lamia volume appears in the broadly
political and narrowly economic concerns about hostile critical
responses to the 1817 volume; Taylor and Hessey, the publishers of
the 1820 volume, suggest that this concern contributed to deter-
mining the contents of the later book.
Further, internally conditioned pressures clearly operate on the
poem as well: Keats's anxiety for a "public" helped generate this
kind of poem, according to his own statement, but his biography
reveals more: he composes Part I of Lamia, which is about the
hero's private head-Lycius, deluded, closes his eyes to enjoy a
mere fantasy of love. He stops work at this point, and composes
Acts II-V of Otho the Great and part of the King Stephen fragment.
Both plays are importantly political, hostile to individualized
privacy, and formally inscribed in the public and social form of the
serious drama.
In Otho, with satirical power the Duke of Franconia exults that
"Amid the wreck of thousands I am whole"; King Stephen begins
with the monarch's bloody injunction and what he calls "my pride
of war." Before returning to Lamia, Keats also composed these
lines for The Fall of Hyperion: "What benefit," asks Moneta,
"canst thou do, or all thy tribe, / To the great world?"33 Joining
the external pressures, then, to reach a reading public, and joining

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 TERENCE ALLAN HOAGWOOD 687

Keats's desire to treat public issues, was this personal immediate

experience of working in the public mode, especially in the
political plays. In those plays, as in The Fall of Hyperion,
individualism and egocentric definitions are treated brutally and
aligned with socially injurious attitudes and acts, even with
violence and war. Lamia and the plays share preoccupations,
including these issues. Such preoccupations are larger than Keats
the man, or Keats the poet; they belong to the England of 1819.
That external setting was turbulent: post-war depression had
impoverished the largest class of the British population, through
both unemployment and inflation; simultaneously, that depression
was the occasion of great enrichment for a small class of capital
investors; the so-called "national debt" was a constantly and
keenly argued issue in the radical press. The class conflict was
sharpened along narrowly political lines: industrial cities, in-
cluding Birmingham, Sheffield, Manchester, and Leeds, had no
parliamentary representation at all, and corruptions in what
electoral system did exist were of course conspicuous. Economic
conflict erupted violently, as in the "Peterloo" massacre of
demonstrating laborers at Manchester on 16 August. In December,
John Thistlewood and James Watson organized another meeting
that turned into a riot, and Thistlewood and four others were
hanged.
Politically, the class-based antagonisms gave rise to expressions
such as Hazlitt's statements in his essay "On the Regal Character,"
which appeared in The Examiner for 29 August 1819, within two
weeks of the Manchester massacre. Hazlitt aligns monarchical
tyranny with the personalistic or narcissistic mode of individual
self-absorption: "personal memory is the natural effect of that self-
importance which makes [kings] attach a correspondent impor-
tance to all that comes in contact with themselves.... That intense
consciousness of their personal identity, which never quits them,
extends to whatever falls under their immediate cognizance" (p.
554). The sort of preoccupation with "self," with "true self," with
"theatrical self," or with "self as mind" which governs so much
modern criticism of Romantic poetry is not similarly valorized by
the Romantic writers; instead, as Hazlitt does here, the poets tend
to mythologize the destructive and specifically political character
of such narcissistic obsessions, aligned as they are with the most
reactionary elements and forces in society.
The importance of The Examiner in Keats's poetic life needs no
rehearsal, but the precisely political character of that association
does warrant emphasis. On 16 February 1817 Hunt had published
in the Examiner Keats's sonnet "To Kosciusko"-a political poem
that, even before the publication of Endymion, belies any notion

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of Keatsas a moon-struck aesthete wedding divinity in his dreams.

On the same page with Keats's sonnet appears an article, "A
Warning to 'Men of Rank and Fortune."' Simply to see his own
poem in print, Keatshad to inform himself of class-basedstruggles
erupting violently in the political world around him. Keats's
poems share political urgency with the other works in this context
in which his poem appears. Keats learned more from Leigh Hunt
than anapestic jingling.
In the same year, Hunt published in the Examiner eight stanzas
from Shelley's Laon and Cythna, or The Revolution of the Golden
City (p. 761), and Shelley's poem bears the pointed subtitle, "A
Vision of the Nineteenth Century." That Hunt's political pro-
gramme affected his interest in Keats as well is obvious in Hunt's
own review of Keats's Poems of 1817, where Hunt praises the
poems for their "evidences of . . . social feelings." In the same
volume, Keats's sonnet, "This Pleasant Tale," appears beside an
anonymous political poem praising Napoleon. Whether or not
Keats'spoem was politicized by conscious authorial intention, and
it seems to me likely that it was, it is unarguably politicized in this
material appearance, applied by Hunt (if not Keats) to episodes of
the Napoleonic history.
Almost immediately before the appearance of Keats's "This
Pleasant Tale," Hunt had printed in the Examiner Keats'ssonnets
"To Haydon" and "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles."These poems
are ostensibly about art rather than about politics, though the
British relocation of the Greeksculptures was a topic of substantial
controversy at the time, as Byron, for example, indicates openly
enough in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Hunt displays the social
and contextual approach to the art that he treats in the Examiner,
however, printing beneath Keats's sonnets an article commending
a painting for its social-political content and implications: D.
Wilkie's The Pedlar shows a "fond father, whose hand in his
pocket and kind but ruminating look shew the combat existing
between his means and his affection for his child" (Examiner for
1817, p. 155). Pictorial values are underplayed in the review: "the
prime beauties" of art are "features of mind and feelings of the
heart." Worksof art, for the Examiner, including Keats'spoems in
the same issue, are socially and politically engaged.
In the number of the Examiner for 23 February 1817, Hunt
prints a quotation from a placard that had been posted conspicu-
ously betweeen Richmond and Kew: "ENGLISHMEN, the Regent
must be put aside for the advancement of the general good. Had
you rather Caesarwere living and die all Slaves, Than that Caesar
were dead, to live all Freemen"(p. 124). Below this passage, on the
same page, appears Keats's sonnet, "After dark vapours have

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 TERENCE ALLAN HOAGWOOD 689

oppressed our plains." One wonders what sort of "oppression"

Hunt has in mind as he prints this poem; again, whether the poem
is politicized by narrowly authorial intention matters far less, in
the poem's material appearance, than the fact that it obviously is
politicized here. Immediately beneath the poem on this page in the
Examiner appears an article, "Military Torture." And beyond this
particular juxtaposition, articles on reform of the franchise, on
suppression of dissent, on executions of political prisoners, and on
worsening poverty exacerbated by machinations such as the
"national debt" appear in virtually every number of the periodical
that launches Keats's poetic career. Whether by personal choice or
under the press of circumstances that surrounded him and his
poems, Keats's works were delivered to the world in a context
charged with political urgency, and it is important to perceive that
political dimension internalized in the poems themselves.

III
Keats begins Lamia with an opening insistence on the relativity
of belief systems. Rather than enter or induce illusion, Keats
positively prevents entrapment in belief, emphasizing first that
pantheons, which are fictions, pass away and succeed one another:

Upon a time, before the faery broods

Drove nymph and Satyr from the prosperous woods
Before King Oberon's bright diadem,
Sceptre, and mantle, clasp'd with dewy gem,
Frighted away the Dryads and the Fauns
From rushes green, and brakes, and cowslip'd lawns
The ever-smitten Hermes empty left
His golden throne.34
(I, 1-8)

The common topic of the relativity of belief systems arises from

skeptical tradition, and its locus classicus is in Sextus Empiricus,
though the line of thought had become naturalized in England
through writers including Bacon, the translations of Montaigne,
Hume, and (in Keats's lifetime) Sir William Drummond. The last
of the skeptical modes in Sextus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism is "the
one depending on lifestyles and customs and laws and belief in
myth and dogmatic suppositions. ... A belief in myth is an
acceptance of matters that did not occur and are fictional. . . . We
oppose each of these sometimes to itself, sometimes to one of the
others."35 This skeptical mode or strategy was a common one
among Keats's contemporaries as well as in his own letters and
poems: it is, for example, much of the point of Byron's lists of

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690 LA M IA

various cultural systems: "Mussulmans ... a Talapoin [Buddhist],

or a Bonze" and "a Paulician, Manichean, Spinozist, Gentile,
Pyrrhonian, Zoroastrian, [or] one of the seventy-two villainous
sects [i.e., Christianity]."36 For Byron as for Keats, to recognize the
multiplicity of belief systems is to elude entrapment in any of
them.
It is Shelley who most conspicuously politicizes this trope: "The
word God cannot mean at the same time an ape, a snake, a bone, a
calabash, a Trinity, and a Unity. Nor can that belief be accounted
universal against which men of powerful intellect and spotless
virtue have in every age protested."37 Historically, human minds
"have been predisposed . . . to adopt the opinions of [their]
countrymen" ("Essay on Christianity," 6:241). "Thus, the concep-
tions which any nation or individual entertains of the God of its
popular worship may be inferred from their own actions and
opinions which are the subjects of their approbation among their
fellow-men" ("Essay on Christianity," 6:238-39).
The trope of displaced belief systems appears also in the Ode to
Psyche, begun two months earlier than Lamia: Psyche is now "too
late for antique vows, / Too, too late for the fond believing lyre";
the historical and cultural conditions when forest, air, water, and
fire were "holy" are remote, and "far retired." Keats's ode thus
begins, as Lamia does, by opening a critical distance on its subject,
and that subject is an ideological system.
The Fall of Hyperion was written contemporaneously with
Lamia, and here the preoccupation with illusion reappears,
together with the dismantling of illusion, the insistent return to
the actualities of the social world, "where men sit and hear each
other groan" (to borrow words from the "Nightingale" ode). The
movement from the ostensibly epic Hyperion to the openly
skeptical Fall of Hyperion is reproduced in the passage from
Lamia I to Lamia II; it is a movement from the abstract but
personalized pretence of that which is avowedly beyond belief, to a
concrete and socialized presentation of a human actuality that no
one can evade. In Lamia I, the collective reality of the polis is
presented only to be evaded by Keats's hero:

As men talk in a dream, so Corinth all,

Throughout her palaces imperial,
And all her populous streets and temples lewd,
Mutter'd, like tempest in the distance brew'd,
To the wide-spreaded night above her towers.
Men, women, rich and poor, in the cool hours,
Shuffled their sandals o'er the pavement white,

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 TERENCE ALLAN HOAGWOOD 691

Companion'd or alone; while many a light

Flared, here and there, from wealthy festivals,
And threw their moving shadows on the walls.
(I, 350-59)

From this collectivity Lycius hides, clinging to his private delusion

more tenaciously as the social world grows nearer: "Muffling his
face, of greeting friends in fear, / Her fingers he press'd hard, as
one came near" (I, 362-63); "Lycius shrank closer, as they met and
past, / Into his mantle" (I, 366-67).
Lamia II begins, then, with a placement of the tale's love-theme
in a socio-economic context:

Love in a hut, with water and a crust,

Is-Love, forgive us!-cinders, ashes, dust;
Love in a palace is perhaps at last
More grievous torment than a hermit's fast:-
That is a doubtful tale from faery land,
Hard for the non-elect to understand.
(II, 1-6)

The poem presents, and then undermines, a sentimental and

conventional fantasy about love-the fantasy that love overcomes
the sordid and painful pressures of actuality, including poverty
(and poverty was of course an actuality with which more and more
British people were becoming more and more closely acquainted).
Using the classifying scheme of rich and poor, Keats has imposed a
class framework on the tale.
That riches and prosperity matter less than romantic true love is
hard for the non-elect to understand; the dispossessed classes can be
expected to have trouble believing such an elitist fairy tale (the
fantasy that "the best things in life are free" is held tenaciously
among those who devote their lives to the accumulation of
capital). Lamia insists on the priority of the material conditions of
life; it insists equally on the falsehood of sentimental and idealized
fictions, which distort actualities even as they mediate them for the
multitude. The relevant opposition is not between beautiful
imagination (Lycius's love) and cold reason (Apollonius); the
relevant conflict obtains rather between material conditions and
the delusions of idealism which mask them, thereby to entrap the
deceived.
In his blissful retreat in his palace with his illusory lover, Lycius
hears the call of the larger world:

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692 LAMIA

they reposed,
. . . with eyelids closed,
When from the slope side of a suburb hill,
Deafening the swallow's twitter, came a thrill
Of trumpets-Lycius started-the sounds fled,
But left a thought, a buzzing in his head.
For the first time, since first he harbour'd in
That purple-lined palace of sweet sin,
His spirit pass'd beyond its golden bourn
Into the noisy world almost forsworn.
(II, 22-33)

When Lycius hears the call of the world, Lamia sighs and
complains sadly that he casts her from his heart; thus appears a
dialectic of private enclosure and the pull of (social) actualities.
Lycius's reply is ambivalent. He begins with an endorsement of
the imagery and impulse of private enclosure and personal
illusion, but then he articulates an engagement with the social
world outside his private fantasy. First,

My silver planet, both of eve and morn!

Why will you plead yourself so sad forlorn,
While I am striving how to fill my heart
With deeper crimson, and a double smart?
How to entangle, trammel up and snare
Your soul in mine, and labyrinth you there
Like the hid scent in an unbudded rose?
(II, 48-54)

An insidious tone lurks in the fantasy. The verbs, "trammel up

and snare," treat his desired action as an imprisonment; the sort of
male-female relations that are figured here would become relevant
and even salient if we were, with Charles I. Patterson, to conceive
Lamia "as a real woman";38 if, instead, we conceive of her as Leon
Waldoff has done, as "internal romance in the poet's psyche,"39
then we are led to recognize that private habit of internalization as
itself an act of imprisonment. If, alternatively, we take her to be an
epitome of illusion, as Bate has done, then the critique of
illusionistic projection with which the poem opens returns here,
in Part II, situated in the bustling metropolis. In this case, the
linkage of illusion with oppression, entrapment, and enslavement
is conspicuous. In none of these cases are we invited uncritically to
share in Lycius's entrapment, or to idealize its deadly consequence,
or to repeat its heinous ideological pattern in our own interpretive
acts.

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 TERENCE ALLAN HOAGWOO 9D 693

Immediately, Lycius himself seeks release:

My thoughts! shall I unveil them? Listen then!

What mortal hath a prize, that other men
May be confounded and abash'd withal,
But lets it sometimes pace abroad majestical,
And triumph, as in thee I should rejoice
Amid the hoarse alarm of Corinth's voice.
Let my foes choke, and my friends shout afar,
While through the thronged streets your bridal car
Wheels round its dazzling spokes.
(II, 56-64)

His assertions of malice and lust for power do not consort with any
reading of Lycius as an enchanted dreamer attempting to enjoy his
lovable "romantic illusion" (as in Rajan's formula),40 nor with a
characterization of Lycius as producer of an "ideal" or "waking
dream of beauty,"41 as Rzepka would suggest; a safely lovable
idealizer could hardly, with decorum, desire the choking of others.
Such a desire, in any case, would hardly represent "Miltonic zeal,"
despite Wolfson's characterization.42 When sympathy shifts from
Lycius to Lamia, as Wolfson observes it does, his foolishness may
be part of the problem, as Wolfson says; more largely, however,
Lycius's fantasy has entailed from the outset the damaging
impulse to imprison ("trammel up and snare") the female object of
his desire, and scarcely latent violence ("Let my foes choke").
While he does call for a public occasion, apparently thus
mitigating the privacy of his secluded enjoyment, the occasion he
calls for is his undoing; his fantasy dies, and his own mechanisms
of private delusion fail in the presence of social pressure. The
poem's last line is a grisly reminder of Lycius's bodily materiality-
his friends find his corpse, "And, in its marriage robe, the heavy
body wound."
Keats's poem is critical of its own illusions. The poem under-
mines the escape attempt whereby ideas are taken to be autonomous
or effective solutions to actual human dilemmas. In the language
of Marx and Engels, "Men are the producers of their conceptions,
ideas, etc."; when people mistake their ideas (which they have
themselves produced) for objectively existing things or powers-
when Lycius mistakes his illusionistic projection for Beauty-an
inversion has taken place.43 The dialectical thinking of the
German Ideology would reaffirm the human origin of the projec-
tion while dissolving its authority over the human producers; and
so would the fiction of Lamia.
Beyond thematic criticism of the expository type, therefore, and
beyond the political topicality opened by critics like Koch, lies a

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694 LA M IA

theoretical issue that has become central to polemics on romanti-

cism. Though it has never been used as a touchstone in such
polemics, Lamia is an especially valuable point of reference. If the
belief that human problems can be defined and solved in ideal
terms constitutes a great romantic illusion,44 then we should learn
to perceive that Keats's poems often, and Lamia particularly, offer
critical treatments of exactly that illusion. It is our activity as
interpreters onto which the poem offers a critical vantage; at this
point, the debate shifts from issues of accuracy in our paraphrases
of the poem, to issues of conceptual starting points that govern our
own work in the critical or scholarly enterprise. Lamia is valuable
here because the poem internalizes ironically the critique that it
constitutes outwardly: that is, within the poem Lycius stands in a
relation of idealistic credulity toward his own projection. We
mimic his idealistic act at our peril; the poem warns of the human
and social conflicts that such idealization displaces, and it drama-
tizes the relations of power that idealizations would mask. Lamia
opens an alienated and critical perspective on the process of
idealization itself.

NOTES
'On the allegorical master codes of literary criticism, and the ideological
investments of these interpretive strategies, see Fredric Jameson, The Political
Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981; rpt. Ithaca: Cornell
Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 28-31.
2Jerome J. McGann, "Keats and the Historical Method in Literary
Criticism," MLN 94 (1979):992.
3Jameson, p. 9.
4Jameson, pp. 9-10.
5Georg Lukacs, Studies in European Realism (New York: Grosset and
Dunlap, 1964), p. 9.
6Jameson, p. 20.
7McGann, "Keats and the Historical Method," p. 991.
8McGann, "Keats and the Historical Method," p. 1017.
9Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 1.
'0McGann, "Keats and the Historical Method," p. 1013.
"Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1977), p. 96.
'2Williams, pp. 132-33.
3McGann, The Romantic Ideology, pp. 69-70.
'4Williams, pp. 148-49. Two books, each appearing after my own essay was
written, offer arguments on Lamia which in some ways help to socialize our
understanding of the poem's meanings: Marjorie Levinson Keats's Life of

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 TERENCE ALLAN HOAGWOOD 695

Allegory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), and Daniel P. Watkins, "The Latter End
of Some Strange History": Keats's Poetry and the Politics of Imagination
(Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, forthcoming). Levinson
writes that "'Lamia' is ... an allegory about the evolution of value forms and
their corresponding social forms, the whole inquiry determined by Keats's
interest in elucidating for the most personal reasons the objective relations
between private and public domains (consumption and production) in his
particular sector of nineteenth-century life" (p. 261). Levinson's argument
shares with my own an interest in the poem's treatment of historicity (p. 262),
though her emphasis on "personal reasons" differs from a cultural materi-
alism like Raymond Williams's or a collective and political unconscious like
that brought forward by Jameson. Levinson also writes of the objectification
and commodification of women in the poem (pp. 264-67) and the social
production of apparently personal values (pp. 275-76). Watkins writes that
Lamia is not simply about "love, but about consumerism, ideology, public
life, economics, and history as well." "Whatever Keats's poetic intentions,
and despite the specific direction of individual poems, he produced a body of
work saturated with historical significance; having as their genesis the
historical moment of bourgeois triumph, they are an important literary
representation of the many ideological dimensions of that triumph" (I quote
from the manuscript of Watkins's still-forthcoming book).
5Williams, p. 187.
'6See, for example, Earl R. Wasserman, The Finer Tone: Keats' Major
Poems (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1953), pp. 166, 173; David
Perkins, The Quest for Permanence: The Symbolism of Wordsworth, Shelley
and Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959), p. 192; Walter
Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963),
especially pp. 549-51; R. H. Fogle, "Keats's 'Lamia' as Dramatic Illusion," in
Nineteenth-Century Literary Perspectives: Essays in Honor of Lionel Steven-
son, ed. Clyde de L. Ryals et al. (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1974), p. 70;
Stuart M. Sperry, Keats the Poet (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973),
pp. 292-309; Tilottama Rajan, Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanti-
cism (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 115-29; Susan J. Wolfson, The
Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in
Romantic Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986), p. 343; and Charles J.
Rzepka, The Self as Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge and
Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 187, 191. Dissenting
voices against this nearly unanimous dualism include Jack Stillinger, "'The
Heart and Nature of Man' in Hyperion, Lamia, and The Fall of Hyperion,"
in "The Hoodwinking of Madeline" and Other Essays on Keats's Poems
(Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1971), pp. 46-66; and (though not on Lamia
specifically) Ronald A. Sharp's chapter, "Keats's Historicism," in Keats,
Skepticism, and the Religion of Beauty (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press,
1979), pp. 114-58.
WV.N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans.
Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (1973; rpt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 13, 95.
8Williams, p. 38.
'9Wolfson, pp. 342-43.
In "Poetics and the Politics of Reception: Keats's 'La Belle Dame Sans
Merci'," ELH 54 (1987): 333-62, Theresa M. Kelley raises again the political
issues involved in McGann's arguments about textual production and
reception: "Keats's belle dame suggests how poetic composition may be
bound up with the exigencies of publication and critical reception as well as

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696 LA MIA

personal circumstance" (p. 334). As that sentence's closing phrase might

suggest, Kelley's argument proceeds directly into the framework of authorial
(and therefore individual, conscious, and private) intentions: Keats "employed
provocative elements of his early Cockneyism for specific poetic ends"
(p. 334).
20Wolfson, p. 335.
2'Rzepka, p. 187.
22Rzepka, p. 191.
23Williams, pp. 38, 62.
24The phrase, "allegorical master narrative," is from Jameson, p. 28.
25Williams, p. 149.
26Rzepka, p. 191.
27Letterto George and Georgiana Keats, 14-31 October 1818; in The Letters
of John Keats 1814-1821, 2 vols., ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), 1:396.
28Rzepka,p. 220.
29Sperry'saccount is more sophisticated on the ambivalence and irresolution
that I would regard under the form of dialectic rather than the simplistic
mechanism of opposites: see Keats the Poet, pp. 308-309.
30Stillinger, "'The Heart and Nature of Man,' " p. 58.
31Louis Althusser et al., Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London:
New Left Books, 1970), pp. 188-89.
32Lettersof John Keats, 2:128, 189, 174.
33Apartfrom McGann's "Keats and the Historical Method" and a series of
essays by Daniel P. Watkins (see Watkins's "Personal Life and Social
Authority in Keats's Isabella," Nineteenth-Century Contexts 11 [1987]: 23-49;
and his "A Reassessment of Keats's Otho the Great," Clio 16 [1986]: 49-66),
very few studies of Keats have pursued this line of thought. Carl Woodring
argued very briefly in 1970 that "politics has an integral place in the Keats
canon" (Politics in English Romantic Poetry [Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1970], p. 78), but Woodring declares, significantly, that he finds
it "easy to wish that Keats had avoided politics in his poems.... it is tenable to
conclude with Garrod that he never touched the succulence of his poetry with
social purpose without corrupting it" (pp. 77-78); the ideological investment
of a claim like that one seems to me obvious. More positively, June Q. Koch
studies the political context of Keats's work and especially the Examiner in
"Politics in Keats's Poetry," JEGP 71 (1972): 491-501, though she writes of
Endymion, Book III, rather than Lamia or the 1820 volume.
34Quotations from Keats's poems are from The Poems of John Keats, ed.
Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978).
35Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 145-48; I cite the excellent
recent text by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes, The Modes of Scepticism:
Ancient Texts and Modern Interpretations (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1985), p. 151.
36Byron'sLetters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols. (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973-82), 2:89.
37Shelley, "A Refutation of Deism," in The Complete Works of Percy
Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, 10 vols. (London:
Ernest Benn; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1926-30), 6:55.
38CharlesI. Patterson, The Daemonic in the Poetry of John Keats (Urbana:
Univ. of Illinois Press, 1970), p. 195.
39Leon Waldoff, Keats and the Silent Work of Imagination (Urbana: Univ.
of Illinois Press, 1985), p. 166.

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 TERENCE ALLAN HOAGWOOD 697

40Rajan, p. 115.
41Rzepka,p. 187.
42Wolfson, p. 335.
43Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, in Marx and
Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis S. Feuer
(Garden City: Doubleday, 1959), p. 247.
44McGann, The Romantic Ideology, pp. 71, 91.

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