Keats and Shelley Virtual Issue

Scholarship on Keats, Shelley and their circles has flourished in recent years, with major new
editions and monographs alongside companions, handbooks, and other important collections
of essays. In 2021-22, bicentennial celebrations of the extraordinary creative output of both
poets (Keats died on 23rd February 1821, Shelley on 8 July 1822) provide an opportunity to
bring together, in this Special Virtual Issue of the Review of English Studies, some of the best
scholarship on their writings to have been published in recent volumes of RES.

Several influential strands of criticism are represented, starting with politically contextualized
readings of major poems. In ‘Keats, “To Autumn”, and the New Men of Winchester’,
Richard Marggraf Turley, Jayne Elizabeth Archer and Howard Thomas draw on new archival
evidence to identify the site that inspired ‘To Autumn’, which leads in turn to new
understanding of Keats’s engagement with contemporary debates about agricultural labour,
production, and supply. Philip Connell’s ‘“A voice from over the Sea”: Shelley’s Mask of
Anarchy, Peterloo, and the English Radical Press’ re-reads Shelley’s trenchant Peterloo poem
alongside the radical journalist Richard Carlile’s accounts of the massacre; verbal parallels
suggest the impact on Shelley of Carlile’s reports while also highlighting his own distinctive
emphasis on non-violent resistance to state-sponsored oppression. Other RES essays nuance
our understanding of what early readers meant by ‘Cockney rhyme’, a term first applied to
Keats in 1818 (Lynda Mugglestone, ‘The Fallacy of the Cockney Rhyme: From Keats and
Earlier to Auden’), and draw out the political significance of Shelley’s prose writings about
finance, taxation, and debtor-creditor relations (Paul Stephens, ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley’s
Ethics of Debt’).

Several recent RES essays have used questions of reception, influence, and intertextuality to

stage fresh readings of particular poems and clarify our sense of literary inheritances more
broadly. Will Bowers’s meticulous analysis of a previously unexamined manuscript notebook
containing a partial translation of Homer by Mary Shelley modifies our view of the so-called
‘Pisan Circle’ as intellectually dominated by men (‘On First Looking into Mary Shelley’s
Homer’). His wittily titled essay sits nicely alongside Henry Power’s brilliant reading of
Keats’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, a poem he situates in a line of closely
related evocations of the oceanic running from Alexander Pope to Thom Gunn (‘Homer and
the Discovery of the Pacific: Gunn, Keats, Pope’). In ‘Reawakening Lycidas: Keats, Milton,
and Epic’, Meiko O’Halloran reveals a poet in creative dialogue with Milton’s great pastoral
elegy of 1638, and demonstrates Keats’s focus on a suffering that he saw as essential to both
his own artistic transformation and a wider cultural renewal.

The archive is never exhausted, and new discoveries by several scholars have opened up
fresh accounts of the development of individual works, and sometimes their contested
reception. Jon Bate traces and redefines the origins of the ‘Ode to Psyche’ via Keats’s reading
of the Irish poets Thomas Moore and Mary Tighe (‘Tom Moore and the Making of the “Ode
to Psyche”’). Michael Rossington’s transcription of the manuscript from which the ‘Ode to
Naples’ was first typeset is a model of scholarly practice, not only in its editorial procedures
but also in highlighting the interpretative consequences of the find (‘Claire Clairmont’s Fair
Copy of Shelley's “Ode to Naples”: A Rediscovered Manuscript’). In ‘Robert Parker's
“Letters on Atheism”: An Early Response to Shelley’s The Necessity of Atheism’, Nicholas
A. Joukovsky fully documents the most intelligent and sustained early reply to Shelley’s
pamphlet, from a series of letters sent to the young poet by his uncle in the spring of 1811.

Keats, ‘to Autumn’, and the New Men of Winchester

Richard Marggraf Turley et al.

The Review of English Studies, Volume 63, Issue 262, November 2012, Pages 797–
817, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgs021
Published: 08 February 2012

It is generally accepted that John Keats composed his ode ‘To Autumn’ following
leisurely daily walks along the water-meadows south of the market city of
Winchester. The present article brings together new archival evidence to suggest
that the ‘eastern extremity’ of Winchester, St Giles's ...

‘A voice from over the Sea’: Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy, Peterloo, and the English
Radical Press

Philip Connell
The Review of English Studies, Volume 70, Issue 296, September 2019, Pages 716–
731, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgz029
Published: 01 September 2019
Shelley’s poetic response to the Peterloo massacre, The Mask of Anarchy , was
crucially informed by printed news sources relating to the momentous events in
Manchester of 16 August 1819. Hitherto our knowledge of those sources has been
confined to Leigh Hunt’s Examiner newspaper. This article ...

THE FALLACY OF THE COCKNEY RHYME: FROM KEATS AND EARLIER

TO AUDEN

LYNDA MUGGLESTONE
The Review of English Studies, Volume XLII, Issue 165, February 1991, Pages 57–
66, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XLII.165.57
Published: 01 February 1991

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ethics of Debt

Paul Stephens
The Review of English Studies, Volume 71, Issue 298, February 2020, Pages 117–
139, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgz010
Published: 19 March 2019

The moral duties informing the debtor-creditor relationship have been examined by
philosophers since Plato. The extent to which debtors are understood to be obliged
to repay their debts—whatever the circumstances—has subsequently shaped
modern political and financial institutions. Although Percy ...

On First Looking into Mary Shelley’s Homer

Will Bowers
The Review of English Studies, Volume 69, Issue 290, June 2018, Pages 510–
531, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgx103
Published: 10 October 2017

This article describes, reconstructs, and analyses the contents of an unexamined

manuscript notebook in the hand of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The notebook is
kept in the Brewer-Leigh Hunt Collection at the University of Iowa. A number of
material and textual factors allow the use of the notebook ...

Homer and the Discovery of the Pacific: Gunn, Keats, Pope

Henry Power
The Review of English Studies, hgaa103, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgaa103
Published: 13 December 2020

Thom Gunn’s ‘The Discovery of the Pacific’ (1970) describes a young couple who
have driven across America and reached the Californian coast. Their exhilaration as
they stare at the ocean recalls another moment of epiphany; when John Keats read
George Chapman’s translation of Homer, he felt like a ...

Reawakening Lycidas: Keats, Milton, and Epic

Meiko O’Halloran
The Review of English Studies, Volume 71, Issue 298, February 2020, Pages 93–
116, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgz038
Published: 18 May 2019

While Keats’s fascination with Milton’s Paradise Lost has long been established in
critical studies, his reading of Milton’s other works remains relatively underexplored.
This article reveals a hitherto unrecognized facet of Keats’s interest in Milton by
examining his surprising response to Lycidas ...

TOM MOORE AND THE MAKING OF THE ‘ODE TO PSYCHE’

JONATHAN BATE
The Review of English Studies, Volume XLI, Issue 163, August 1990, Pages 325–
333, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XLI.163.325
Published: 01 August 1990

Claire Clairmont's Fair Copy of Shelley's ‘Ode to Naples’: A Rediscovered

Manuscript

Michael Rossington
The Review of English Studies, Volume 56, Issue 223, February 2005, Pages 59–
89, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgi005
Published: 01 February 2005

This article is concerned with the first of two fair copies of the first of two different
versions of Shelley's ‘Ode to Naples’, each of which the poet appears to have
authorized for the press. The manuscript, in Claire Clairmont's hand, was noted a
century ago by the Shelley scholar and collector ...
 Robert Parker's ‘Letters on Atheism’: An Early Response to Shelley's The
Necessity of Atheism

Nicholas A. Joukovsky
The Review of English Studies, Volume 63, Issue 261, September 2012, Pages 608–
633, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgr082
Published: 06 December 2011

This article presents texts of a hitherto unknown series of letters to Percy Bysshe
Shelley from his uncle Robert Parker (1754–1837), a lawyer and banker at
Maidstone and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. Although the
original letters have disappeared, full copies of six of them are ...
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