Skip to navigation – Site map

HomeNuméros65-66'La politique à l'air libre' suit...Poetry and politics in the afterm...

'La politique à l'air libre' suite au massacre de Manchester

Poetry and politics in the aftermath of Peterloo: John Keats’s ode “To Autumn”

Helen Goethals
p. 143-161

Abstracts

“To Autumn” is not often associated with the Radical politics played out in and around Manchester in 1819. John Keats’s last published poem has been alternately praised for its artistic perfection or its cleverly-coded historical references, but this paper brings these apparently disparate readings together. Following Keats’s own conviction that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” it will be argued that what the poem (linguistically) performs is a far-seeing and radical vision of the nature and function of work.

Top of page

Full text

Poems swim free of their age and live in ours;
but if we understand them on their own terms rather than conform them to ours,
they take on a fuller life, and so do we.
—Michael Schmidt,
Lives of the Poets, 1999, 10.

Poetry and Peterloo

  • 1 ‘POLYP’, Eva Schlunke and Robert Poole, Peterloo: Witnesses to a Massacre. (Oxford: New Internation (...)

1If one wishes to gain a better feeling for the historical event that quickly came to be known as ‘Peterloo’, then the ballads and songs of the period are undoubtedly a good place to start. Alison Morgan’s recent anthology gives an excellent account of the sheer volume, as well as the surprising variety, of the contemporary response in verse. Indeed, ballads and songs were not merely responses to an event but, as Samuel Bamford somewhat immodestly pointed out, very much part of the event itself: “Our whole column would probably consist of 6000 men, at our head 100 or two of our handsomest girls: sweethearts to the lads who were with us, dancing to the music, or singing snatches of popular songs: and mine own was among them.”1

  • 2 Poole, Robert, “The March to Peterloo: Politics and Festivity in Late Georgian England,” Past and P (...)
  • 3 First published in December 1819, Hone’s satire was illustrated by George Cruikshank, and ran to 54 (...)
  • 4 The third edition of Robert Southey’s “satirical tragedy,” published without his permission in 1819 (...)

2So powerful was poetry considered to be in the lead-up to the massacre, that in May 1819 ballad-singing was banned on the streets of Manchester.2 Sometimes, however, the music alone, without the words, would be sufficient to convey the desired message safely. The arrival on St. Peter’s Field of Henry Hunt, we may remember, was to the tune of “See the Conquering Hero Comes,” from Handel’s Messiah. The political resetting of nursery rhymes was also a popular political ploy, and Peterloo produced two masterpieces of this genre: “The Political House that Jack Built” by William Hone3 and the lesser-known but equally satirical “Who Killed Cock Robin?” by John Cahuac.4

3Writing which speaks directly to its times is understandably popular, and easily filed under the heading of ‘political verse’ but poems which speak more indirectly to their times, yet survive without footnotes into later times tend to be labelled ‘literature’. From there it is but a short step to the long-held critical belief that for literature to be read for its political interest is not only unhelpful but actually demeaning to its social status. Happily, such views were not dominant in 1819 and the poets we now call ‘the Romantics’ were very much conscious of writing within a political context. How did they respond to Peterloo? To answer that question, we first need to understand that there were in fact two generations of Romantic poets.

4The response of the first generation was muted, for a number of reasons and in a number of ways. Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey had been in their prime at the time of the French Revolution, and had invented a new literary form to accompany it: the lyrical ballad. Thirty years later, Robert Burns was long dead, and the elderly Blake saw the dawn of a New Age more in artistic and spiritual terms than in party-political ones. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were in their late forties, but willy-nilly aspects of their youthful radicalism resurfaced after the death of Napoleon. William Wordsworth’s shorter poems had been reset in a new edition in 1815, reintroducing sonnets such as “The World is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—” to a new generation.5 Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, developed ideas about the social function of literature that, paradoxically for this conservative and Christian thinker, inspired the circle of Radical poets that was gathering around Leigh Hunt. The poet laureate Robert Southey was the target of that circle’s particular anger. Yet even he contributed, albeit unwittingly, to the literary uproar of the times, when in 1817 a rogue editor republished an early radical verse play of his, entitled Wat Tyler. This short and rather good verse play about the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 contains the couplet that was to become the Republican motto: “When Adam delved and Eve span, / Who was then the gentleman?”6

  • 7 The Mask of Anarchy was published in 1832, “Song: To the Men of England” and “England in 1819” in 1 (...)
  • 8 They were published in Prometheus Unbound, a Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, with Other Poems, 1820.

5The younger generation of Romantics—Byron, Shelley, Keats—were caught up in the outrage at Peterloo, but due to severe censorship their direct responses, although now much quoted, were not well-known at the time. Lord Byron’s attitude to Peterloo is recorded in Cantos III and IV of Don Juan, published two years after the event. Shelley’s more fiery reaction was well-expressed in The Mask of Anarchy, in the song “To the Men of England,” and in that most savage of sonnets, “England in 1819.” These have been often discussed in relation to Peterloo, but they were not in fact published until well after the event.7 Prometheus Unbound and “Ode to the West Wind” were the only non-libellous, albeit clear, responses to Peterloo published within Shelley’s lifetime.8 Besides which, these poets-in-exile were physically remote from the events they were responding to: Shelley in Pisa, Byron in Ravenna.

John Keats the Radical

6John Keats, on the other hand, was living in England at the time and an eyewitness, not to the Manchester massacre itself, but to some of the aftermath. In August 1819, Keats was 23 and the author of two published poetry collections: Poems (1816) and Endymion (1817), on which the Tory press had poured snobbish scorn. 1819 was the year which literary historian Robert Gittings called Keats’s “living year,” the annus mirabilis during which he wrote the poems for which he is best remembered, those that make up most of his third and last collection, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, published in July 1820. Among the ‘other poems’ are his best-known: “La Belle Dame sans merci” and the great odes “On a Grecian Urn” and “To a Nightingale.” The only poem written after Peterloo is “To Autumn,” the ode which brings Keats’s “living year” to a close, and the last complete poem he ever composed.

  • 9 Roe, Nicholas, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
  • 10 Roe, Nicholas, John Keats. A New Life (Yale: Yale University Press, 2013), 21.
  • 11 An 1822 edition of Lemprière’s Bibliotheca Classica, or Classical Dictionary can be found at https: (...)

7Undoubtedly, Keats had Radical sympathies. He had grown up within what his latest biographer Nicholas Roe calls “the culture of dissent.” 9At Clarke’s Academy, his school in Enfield, for example, “Talk of English liberties and the natural world filled the schoolhouse, especially in the summer of 1803 when the common land at Enfield was enclosed.”10 Keats was said to have known by heart John Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, a source of classical lore so wide-ranging and iconoclastic that it was banned in the public schools attended by Byron and Shelley, Lemprière being considered almost on a par with Paine for sedition.11

  • 12 The articles in question attacking “the Cockney School of Poetry” were written by ‘Z’ (John Gibson (...)

8Unlike the other Romantics, Keats took not just a philosophical but also a personal interest in constitutional reform, since he was the orphan son of an ostler and a n’er-do-well wife, whose small estate was entailed. Propertyless, living in cheap London lodgings, he was excluded from the franchise. When he moved to London for his medical studies at Guy’s Hospital, he was rapidly assimilated into the Radical circle which gathered around Leigh Hunt. Indeed, it was because Keats’s poems were published in The Examiner that the Tory reviewers of Blackwood’s Magazine poured upon him a social and cultural scorn so venomous that some believed that it triggered the tuberculosis which killed him at the age of 25.12

  • 13 An interesting account of Keats’s stay in Winchester can be found here: https://literarywinchester. (...)
  • 14 Letter to Fanny Brawne, 16th August 1819. Rollins, Hyder Edward, The Letters of John Keats, vol 2 1 (...)

9Where was Keats on August 16th 1819? We know something of what he was doing and thinking from the surviving letters.13 He was staying in lodgings in Winchester, with his friend Charles Brown, his mind on the perils of a young and impoverished poet forsaking his calling for love of a pretty woman. He projected his sense of entanglement into a long poem entitled “Lamia,” about a snake-woman, and confessed it in a letter to the woman herself, Fanny Brawne. It might seem then that his thoughts were many miles away from Manchester, were it not for the breathtakingly clairvoyant metaphor that on August 16th he used to describe his agitated emotional state to his beloved Fanny Brawne: “I am not happy enough for silken Phrases and silver sentences/I can no more use soothing words to you than if I were at this moment engaged in a charge of Cavalry.”14

10Keats was as shocked as any Radical at the news of what had happened in Manchester, but his friend Charles Dilke forwarded weekly copies of The Examiner to him, which he said put him “into [better] spirits.” The issues of 5th, 12th and 17th of September would certainly repay further study for the light they throw on the Radical state of mind at the time. On Friday September 10th, Keats travelled up to London on financial business, after which he rode out to visit his sister at Walthamstow. It was on his return on Monday 13th that he saw the crowd assembled to cheer Henry Hunt during his entry into London as a prisoner awaiting trial. Keats wrote to his brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana:

  • 15 Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, September 17-27, 1819. Rollins, Hyder Edward, ed. Letters, Vo (...)

You will hear by the papers of the proceedings at Manchester and Hunt’s triumphal entry into London. It would take me a whole day and a quire of paper to give you anything like detail. I will merely mention that it is calculated that 30,000 people were in the streets waiting for him. The whole distance from the Angel at Islington to the Crown and Anchor was lined with multitudes.15

Keats returned to Winchester alone, and on September 22nd he was to be found writing to John Hamilton Reynolds:

How beautiful the season is now—how fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather. Dian skies. I never lik’d stubble fields so much as now—Aye, better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow a stubble field looks warm—in the same way that some pictures look warm—this struck me so much in my Sunday’s walk that I composed upon it.16

  • 17 Newey, Vincent, “‘Alternate Uproar and Sad Peace’: Keats, Politics and the Idea of Revolution” in T (...)
  • 18 Newey, Vincent, “‘Alternate Uproar,’” 288.
  • 19 The undisputed champion of the purely aesthetic approach is Helen Vendler who, among other fine rea (...)

11Partly because of this biographical context but also because of the ever-returning season in its title, “To Autumn” was for a very long time praised solely for its projection of autumnal peace, as a “contemplative poem of sustained forgetting,”17 a timeless poem which turns its back on the fractious circumstances surrounding its conception, in order to celebrate “a capacity quite opposite to that of political engagement.”18 Keats’s composition has been rightly praised for its pictorial qualities, for its intricate rhyme scheme, its sensuous language and rural imagery.19 “To Autumn” became the most-anthologized poem in the English language, and one which has many times been called the “perfect poem.”

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
  With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
  And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
    To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
  With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
    For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
  Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
  Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
  Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
    Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep 
  Steady thy laden head across a brook;
  Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
    Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
  Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
  And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
  Among the river sallows, borne aloft
    Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
  Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
  The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
    And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Historicizing “To Autumn”

  • 20 Published in MLN 94, 5 (December 1979): 988-1032.

12The historical readings of the poem did not begin until 1979, with Jerome J. McGann’s seminal essay, “Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism.”20 McGann’s historicizing approach gave rise to an interest in the radicalism of the Romantics in general, which can be seen in works such as Marilyn Butler’s Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (1981) and Ronald Paulson’s Representations of Revolution (1983). However, the poet-critic who did the most to place “To Autumn” in the specific context of Peterloo was Tom Paulin. As early as 1986, in The Faber Book of Political Verse, he had placed the Romantics as a group within a long literary tradition of Radical republicanism, and in 2008 his critical work, The Secret Life of Poems, really made the advocates of poetry-for-poetry’s-sake seethe with fury.

13In the chapter on “To Autumn,” Paulin cites a lovely line from one of Keats’s letters: “Circumstances are like Clouds continually gathering and bursting—while we are laughing the seed of some trouble is put into the wide arable land of events.” 21Taking this as his cue, Paulin contends that, “If we look closely we can see that this is a pastoral poem which aims to communicate a subtle anxiety and discomfort behind or within its apparently attractive images.” Paulin’s argument is mainly semantic: he saw, for example, in the word ‘conspiring’ a coded allusion to the ‘Manchester conspiracy’ or in ‘redbreast’ a reference to the red-coated militia. Another loaded word would be ‘gleaner,’ in the second stanza. Paulin pointed out that Keats the reader of, and contributor to, the radical Examiner was only too well aware of the rural hardship caused by the 1818 law which had made gleaning illegal. Gleaners were disliked by farmers on the grounds that gleaning was a way for workers to avoid, or demand higher wages for, the harder work of reaping.

  • 22 Turley, R. M., J. E. Archer and H. Thomas, “Keats, “To Autumn” and the New Men of Winchester,” The (...)

14Other critics have picked up on and developed the socio-economic aspects of the poem, concentrating on its local setting, so as to develop the notion that the poem is about the negative effects of the agricultural revolution as Keats saw them during his brief stay in Winchester. In other words, what Keats’s poem hides is what, according to the historical accounts, he actually saw: enclosed fields, deforestation, increasingly mechanized reaping and threshing, workers whose wages were too low for them to have been idle. He is writing against a background of violent rural protest against the banning of the traditional “Winchester measure,” a heaped measure more generous than the new bushel. He is “recording, without nostalgia or sentiment, a set of relationships to the land that are often fraught and always in tension, relationships in the process of being disguised and repackaged (through tour guides and visual iconography).”22

15We could multiply the examples of coded historical references, and it is not hard to guess why they should be coded. Bearing in mind the nature and function of the Cockney slang familiar to Keats, and especially the colourfully-coded lexicon of the London underworld, helps us to understand how the polysemy of poetry is better adapted than plain prose, to seditious politics. The problem is that literary critics find one set of virtues (those to do with beauty) in the poem whereas the historians find another (truth). Yet we know from the closing lines of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” that Keats himself believed that the historical and the aesthetic were two sides of the same object shaped by a human hand:

  • 23 Keats, John, Poems (London: J.M Dent & Sons, 1969), 192.

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st;
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
23

16There is a view which, I believe, might reconcile the two camps, but it involves going beyond the merely historical perspective in order to enter the realm of politics or, as it was still known in Keats’s time, moral philosophy. The historicist readings I have cited so far are all pertinent and well-argued but they do not uncover what makes Keats’s vision truly radical, even revolutionary. After all, many Tories were also at that time lamenting the economic and social changes for the worse that the industrial revolution had brought about. There is a fundamental difference between a historical reading which seeks no more than to restore a poem to its historical context and a political reading which attends to the aesthetic means used to persuade us towards what the poet would like us to experience as a political truth.

The Politics of Pastoral

  • 24 Poole, Robert, “The March to Peterloo: Politics and Festivity in late Georgian England,” Past and P (...)

17The Radical truth of Keats’s politics has less to do with either the quietism praised by the literary critics or the rural protest perceived by economic historians than with a quality developed in the work of the social historian Robert Poole. In an illustrated article entitled “The March to Peterloo” Poole sees the march itself as “political discourse on the move.”24 Poole’s linking of politics with festivity and his foregrounding of rural customs such as rush cutting help direct our reading of “To Autumn” towards its festive qualities. In such a reading, we can experience its celebration of autumnal beauty as a performative plea for a politics of the open air, enjoyed in a common space which is both high-spirited and disciplined. This idea works both on the historical and the literary level.

18In historical terms we understand that the intended event in St. Peter’s Fields was an open-air meeting to, quite literally, air ideas about Reform. As Poole points out, even the disciplinary preparations for the meeting were in the open air. In Witnesses to a Massacre, Poole includes Bamford’s words on the beneficial effects of drilling for the march: “We jumped from our looms, and rushed to the sweet cool air of the fields.” We remember too that Keats’s only firsthand connection to Peterloo was his witnessing of the people’s open-air, and surely festive, reception of Henry Hunt’s “triumphal entry” into London.

  • 25 “The Trees,” in Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), 166.
  • 26 Magnusson, Paul, Reading Public Romanticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 5.

19On the literary level, the conglomeration of words on the page only truly becomes a poem when the effects of those words are aired in literary discussion, in a transhistorical meeting of minds, when successive generations of readers respond to the words on the page. Thus the meaning of a poem is not confined to the enclosed space of the page, any more than a bird is confined to its nest: rather, it is released into the open space of innumerable interpretations, each one rigorously attentive to what, as Philip Larkin so admirably put it, is almost being said.25 When a poem is made public it is released into an ever-changing literary space in which it will be read from an infinite variety of points of view. As Paul Magnuson argued so cogently, “Esthetics is thus a question not of literary form, but of locations.”26

  • 27 Mizukoshi, Ayumi, Keats, Hunt and the Aesthetics of Pleasure (New York: Palgrave, 2001) has a chapt (...)
  • 28 The tree of idleness appears in Bitter Lemons and in the poem entitled “The Tree of Idleness.” To t (...)

20The open-air has ever been the ideal setting for political discussion, one that allows both the free play of ideas and the discipline of form. We first become aware of open-space politics at play in the species of poem known as the pastoral.27 The pastoral form originated with Theocritus, the Sicilian Greek poet who, when exiled to Alexandria in the third century BC, wrote a series of poems later known as the Idylls. In the Idylls two, or sometimes three, shepherds gather under the shade of a tree to watch over their flocks. After evoking the latest political gossip and dropping a few names, they enjoy their leisure by engaging in amicable song contests. The mood is not dissimilar to that of the African palaver or of the conversation under Lawrence Durrell’s “tree of idleness.”28 The politics of the pastoral form are not so much that of content—even though all pastoral is peppered with political references—as of setting. There are many versions of pastoral, but central to all of them is an outdoor setting. This bucolic setting then conditions the natural tone and the unforced language which constitute a politics of the open air.

21The outdoor setting of the third-century Greek pastoral poems (and that of the later Bucolics of Virgil) encourages a playful exchange on subjects of common concern. In such a setting, language itself serves a political purpose, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau pointed out:

  • 29 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Essai sur les origines des langues (1781). Available in French at http://ww (...)

Il y a des langues favorables à la liberté́, ce sont les langues sonores, prosodiques, harmonieuses, dont on distingue le discours de fort loin. […] Chez les anciens on se faisait entendre aisément au peuple sur la place publique ; on y parlait tout un jour sans s’incommoder. […] Or, je dis que toute langue avec laquelle on ne peut pas se faire entendre au peuple assemblé, est une langue servile ; il est impossible qu’un peuple demeure libre et qu’il parle cette langue-là.29

  • 30 Keats, John, letter to John Taylor, February 27th, 1818.

Perhaps what Keats said of poetry is equally true of politics: “If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.”30

22Henry Hunt, also known as ‘Orator Hunt’, needed no form of amplification to be heard by the assembled people. The Peterloo massacre bears witness to the fact that the authorities were in no doubt about the political danger to themselves inherent in the open spaces where two or three might naturally gather together. By the end of 1819, meetings of more than 50 people, i.e., meetings which were only affordable if they took place out-of-doors, were effectively banned by the Seditious Meetings Act. As Robert Poole put it, “the politics of the meeting room supplanted those of the village green.”31 And, just to make sure, interest in the control of vagrancy was renewed: from the perspective of liability in 1821,32 and more substantially three years later. The Vagrancy Act of 1824 is still in force today: in 2020, 573 persons were prosecuted under this Act.33

  • 34 The Poetical Works of John Keats, F.T. Palgrave ed., (London: Macmillan, 1884), 278.
  • 35 Written in March 1818 and published in Leigh Hunt, Literary Pocket-Book, or Companion for the Lover (...)

23It has been said that “To Autumn” is a poem “such as Theocritus might have longed to write.”34 If this is true, as I think it is, then what is the political message of Keats’s pastoral? It has to do with the repose of the poem so dear to the aesthetic critics, the sights and sounds and other sensuous experiences which Keats associates with early Autumn. In the sonnet “The Human Seasons” Keats had used the four seasons to mirror the different moods in the mind of man. This is what he says there of Autumn: “quiet coves / His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings/ He furleth close; contented so to look / On mists in idleness—” 35

  • 36 Roe, John Keats: A New Life, 302ff. Roe’s discussion of “To Autumn” (353-356) emphasizes its affini (...)

24The key word here is idleness. Nicholas Roe in his biography of Keats draws attention to a remark made by a member of the family to whom, because of his entailed estate, Keats had to render accounts: “the Keatses were ever indolent.” Roe believes that this wounding observation stung Keats into a defence of what he called “delightful diligent idleness,” a state of “negative capability” eminently propitious to meditation and the writing of poetry.36 As evidence Roe cites a letter written to J. H. Reynolds on the 19th February 1818 in which “the beauty of the morning operating on a sense of idleness” produced the sonnet “What the Thrush said” which Keats copied directly into the letter, adding:

  • 37 Letter to J.H. Reynolds, Feb 19, 1818.

Now it is more noble to sit like Jove than to fly like Mercury—let us not therefore go hurrying about and collecting honey, bee-like buzzing here and there impatiently from a knowledge of what is to be aimed at; but let us open our leaves like a flower and be passive and receptive—budding patiently under the eye of Apollo and taking hints from every noble insect that favours us with a visit—sap will be given us for meat and dew for drink.37

  • 38 Roe, John Keats: A New Life, 327.

25One of the “songs of Spring” which Keats wrote in 1819 was an “Ode on Indolence” but, although he confided to a friend that “the thing that I have most enjoyed this year is writing an ode to Indolence,”38 that particular ode was the only one omitted from his last collection. Perhaps he feared that his celebration of indolence would only arouse Tory jeers, or perhaps he later felt that indolence had been better hymned in “To Autumn?”

  • 39 The expression is taken from Seamus Heaney, Field-Work (London: Faber & Faber, 1979), 56.

26For, as Keats shows in the final stanza, Autumn too has its auroras and it is always wise to listen to what Seamus Heaney calls “the music of what happens.”39 What is happening in this poem is the slow enjoyment that comes after sufficient (and no more than sufficient) work. “To Autumn” was written before the Autumn equinox, while the fields are still warm, before the swallows have flown south. It celebrates mellow September, the time of abundance and fellowship that comes with rest after hard work. In Winchester, as all over England, it is the time of the harvest festival and St. Giles’ Fair, with its stalls of vegetables and fruit in abundance, and cider fresh from the press. In such a time neither poets nor hedge-crickets nor anyone else need sing for their supper but for the sheer pleasure of song.

  • 40 On this question, the most famous account is Max Weber’s in The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spiri (...)

27Pastoral is often seen as escape-art but Keats’s poem is also parable-art in that the poet’s “delicious diligent Indolence” functions as both the means and the end of political action. It performs the means to leisure, means which have been explicated by the aesthetic critics: the languid rhythm, the four-stress line close to natural speech, the sensuous enjoyment of the phenomenal world […] and in so doing it signals what should be the end of all political action, the right of all not just to what is necessary but to what is sufficient to the many as well as the few. The poem is a plea for the pleasure that rhymes with leisure, and a protest against what was later called “the Protestant work ethic,”40 already all too busy creating the divisive and destructive surpluses of Capitalism.

28Keats expressed his political view of Peterloo in two paramount ways: directly in a lengthy letter to George and Georgina Keats, written in fits and starts in September 1819, and indirectly in “To Autumn,” the only poem he wrote after Peterloo. In the letter he begins by situating “the present struggle” within the long history of English resistance to tyranny: such a view places Peterloo as merely a temporary—indeed, a temporal—setback. The attempt at reform failed, not because it was intrinsically flawed, but because the time was not ripe. In Keats’s view, perhaps more Liberal than Radical, historical change can come about only gradually:

  • 41 Rollins, Hyder Edward, ed., The Letters of John Keats. Vol 2, 1819-1821, 193. Spelling modernized. (...)

The example of England, and the Liberal writers of France and England sowed the seed of opposition to this Tyranny–and it was swelling in the ground till it burst out in the French revolution–That has had an unlucky termination. It put a stop to the rapid progress of free sentiments in England; and gave our Court hopes of turning back to the despotism of the sixteenth century. They have made a handle of this event in every way to undermine our freedom. They spread a horrid superstition against all innovation and improvement–The present struggle in England of the people is to destroy this superstition.41

  • 42 For more on Keats’s view of revolution and historical change, see Thomas Reed’s analysis of “Hyperi (...)
  • 43 Ecclesiastes 3: 1.

29The organic metaphor is key here: the seed of reform is sown, but its natural fruition may be arrested by a premature “bursting out.” The desire for political reform did not flower in St. Peter’s Field because it had not been sufficiently thought through: it was due merely to the pressure of social “distresses.” The emergence of political reform, like that of the writing of a poem, cannot be hurried: it must be allowed to come naturally “as leaves to a tree,” in its own good time.42 The required response to failure is not despair but patience and a trust in a benevolent fullness of time: “To everything there is a time, A time for every activity under heaven.”43

30The letter goes on to reveal the extent to which Keats believed that “innovation and improvement” would come not from great leaders but from the people. The second generation of Romantics lived in the shadow not just of the failure of the French Revolution, but also of the fall of Napoleon, in whom many had placed their hopes for social and political reform. This had made them wary of all leaders, including Henry Hunt. The account Keats gives of seeing the triumphal return to London of the defeated Hunt has already been cited, but it repays re-reading from a different perspective:

You will hear by the papers of the proceedings at Manchester and Hunt’s triumphal entry into London–I[t] would take me a whole day and a quire of paper to give you anything like detail–I will merely mention that it is calculated that 30,000 people were in the streets waiting for him–The whole distance from the Angel Islington to the Crown and Anchor was lined with Multitudes. 

31What does Keats draw our attention to? Not to the aura of greatness in defeat, but to the “30,000 people,” to the “Multitudes” in the street. Sheer numbers represent power: the many are more important than the few. And rather than speculate directly on Hunt’s trial, Keats offers news of Carlisle the Bookseller, who had republished Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and “many other works held in superstitious horror.” Despite the numerous indictments against him, he had been given bail because “After all they are affraid [sic] to prosecute: they are affraid of his defence: it would be published in all the papers all over the Empire: they shudder at this: the Trials would light a flame they could not extinguish.” Such, Keats implies, is the power of the written word and its newfound influence on public opinion.

32Keats’s identification with the enlightenment of the many rather than the brute force of the few was not new: he had expressed it more than a year prior to Peterloo. Allowing, as we saw previously, his thoughts to wander in “delicious diligent Indolence,” remaining “passive and receptive,” he came up with an organic metaphor which makes a political belief ring true because it is beautiful:

  • 44 Letter to J. H. Reynolds, February 19th, 1818.

Man should not dispute or assert but whisper results to his neighbour and thus by every germ of spirit sucking the sap from mould ethereal every human might become great, and Humanity instead of being a wide heath of Furze and Briars with here and there a remote Oak or Pine, would become a grand democracy of Forest Trees!44

33These stated beliefs in the consolations of seasonal Time and the inevitable return of the natural power of the many need to be kept in mind when we read “To Autumn” as a political poem. Written after a lawful outdoor assembly had been quite literally mown down, it is a performative response to that event. For the very word ‘aftermath’ is an organic metaphor, referring to the new grass which springs up after mowing or harvesting. Like a poetic parliament of birds, Keats’s “gathering swallows”—will naturally migrate south—perhaps to Naples, or to Pisa?—and will return, like the hopes borne on Shelley’s west wind, in the Spring.

34The “diligent Indolence” in which the poet delights is seen as dangerous “idleness” by the political economists, by those wishing to employ the labouring classes as cheaply as possible and by the Utilitarian philosophers, who considered the idle of no use to society. Shelley, in his Defence of Poetry, would meet the Utilitarians on their own terms, insisting that their over-rational and mechanical schemes had exacerbated social distresses and created a bleak moral landscape which only the creative imagination of the poet could counterbalance:

  • 45 Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, [1821]. My emphasis. For an excellent discussion of the (...)

The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave. To what but a cultivation of the mechanical arts in a degree disproportioned to the presence of the creative faculty, which is the basis of all knowledge, is to be attributed the abuse of all invention for abridging and combining labour, to the exasperation of the inequality of mankind?45

  • 46 « Les philosophes de l’Antiquité enseignaient le mépris du travail, cette dégradation de l’homme li (...)

35In other words, the abridgement and combination of Labour has brought great wealth to the few, but no time in which the many may enjoy the fruits of “delightful, diligent Indolence.” The poet’s task, as “unacknowledged legislator,” is to look forward to, and stir in the many a desire for, better times. And, indeed, the celebration of the idle delight that brings wisdom, and the whole Romantic vision of the fruits of work, were to find echoes in later thinkers. Keats’s “delightful diligent Indolence” expressed in this poem looks forward, politically speaking, to the still insufficiently-heeded call to idleness of Paul Lafargue: “The philosophers of Antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of free man; the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the gods.”46

  • 47 “In Praise of Idleness” was first published in Harper’s Magazine in October 1932. It was reprinted (...)

36Closer to our own time, that message was to be repeated in Bertrand Russell’s 1932 manifesto, “In Praise of Idleness,” in which he argues that, modern methods of production having augmented productivity, the road to happiness and prosperity lies not in choosing overwork for some and unemployment leading to starvation for others, but in an organized diminution of work for all.47 “Modern technique,” Russell notes, “has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community.” The fault lies in the mindset that was ushered in with the industrial revolution: “Modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.” Like Keats’s personification of Autumn as “careless,” “drows’d” and “patient,” work should be seen as a means, not an end, the end being consumption or, as Keats would have it, the sensuous enjoyment of the harvest. John Keats, Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes would agree that social disorder springs not from over-production and idleness, but from under-consumption and unequal distribution.

37In a world that cultivates a state of natural enjoyment, social violence such as that of ‘Peterloo’ or of the Great Depression, will disappear. Keats’s pastoral poem does not mask the political unrest of its time, but gives us the direct experience of a Rousseauian world of ‘good nature’, mirroring Russell’s concluding words, which I now also make mine:

  • 48 Russell, In Praise of Idleness, 1935, 28-29.

Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all. Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle.48

Top of page

Bibliography

BEATTY, Frederika. “Theocritus in Hampstead.” The Classical Journal 43, 6 (March 1948): 327-332.

CAHUAC, John. Who Killed Cock Robin? 1819.

EMPSON, William. Some Versions of Pastoral: A Study of the Pastoral Form in Literature. London: Chatto & Windus, 1935.

GITTINGS, Robert. John Keats: The Living Year, 21 September 1818 to 21 September 1819. Harvard, Harvard University Press, 1954.

HONE, William. The Political House that Jack Built. 1819.

KEATS, John. Poems. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1969 [1906].

KEATS, John. The Letters of John Keats. Vol II 1819-21. Hyder Edward Rollins ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012 [1958].

LAFARGUE, Paul. Le Droit à la paresse : Réfutation du droit au travail de 1848. Paris : Henry Oriol, 1883.

LEMPRIERE, John. Bibliotheca Classica, or A Classical Dictionary, London: T. Cadell Jun and W. Davies, 1801.

McGANN, John. “Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism.” MLN 94, 5 (December 1979): 988-1032.

MORGAN, Alison. Ballads and Songs of Peterloo. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018.

NEWEY, Vincent. “‘Alternate Uproar and Sad Peace’: Keats, Politics and the Idea of Revolution.” The Yearbook of English Studies 19 (1989): 265-289.

PAULIN, Tom. The Secret Life of Poems: A Poetry Primer. London: Faber, 2008.

‘POLYP’, Eva Schlunke, Robert Poole. Peterloo: Witnesses to a Massacre. Oxford: New Internationalist, 2019.

POOLE, Robert. “The March to Peterloo: Politics and Festivity in Late Georgian England.” Past and Present 192 (August 2006): 109-153.

POOLE, Robert. Peterloo: The English Uprising. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

ROE, Nicholas. John Keats and the Cult/ure of Dissent. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

ROE, Nicholas. John Keats: A New Life. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013.

ROUSSEAU, Jean-Jacques. Essai sur l’origine des langues. Geneva, 1781.

RUSSELL, Bertrand. In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.,1935.

SCHMIDT, Michael. Lives of the Poets. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.

SHELLEY, Percy Bysshe. Selected Poems and Prose. Jack Donovan, Cian Duffy eds. London: Penguin Books, 2016.

SOUTHEY, Robert. Wat Tyler: A Dramatic Poem in Three Acts. 1817.

TURLEY, R. M., J. E. ARCHER, H. THOMAS. “Keats, “To Autumn” and the New Men of Winchester.” The Review of English Studies, New Series, 63, 262 (November 2012): 797-817.

VENDLER, Helen. The Odes of John Keats. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1985.

Top of page

Notes

1 ‘POLYP’, Eva Schlunke and Robert Poole, Peterloo: Witnesses to a Massacre. (Oxford: New Internationalist, 2019), 35. A small selection of ballads and poems can be found in the Detours section of this issue of Caliban.

2 Poole, Robert, “The March to Peterloo: Politics and Festivity in Late Georgian England,” Past and Present 192 (Aug 2006), 135.

3 First published in December 1819, Hone’s satire was illustrated by George Cruikshank, and ran to 54 editions. An annotated version of the forty-fourth edition may be found at https://romantic-circles.org/editions/hone/jacktext.htm

4 The third edition of Robert Southey’s “satirical tragedy,” published without his permission in 1819, can be found at https://books.google.fr/books?id=uybPmAEACAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

5 The poem can be read at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45564/the-world-is-too-much-with-us

6 This “dramatic poem” can be read at https://romantic-circles.org/editions/wattyler/index.html

7 The Mask of Anarchy was published in 1832, “Song: To the Men of England” and “England in 1819” in 1839.

8 They were published in Prometheus Unbound, a Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, with Other Poems, 1820.

9 Roe, Nicholas, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

10 Roe, Nicholas, John Keats. A New Life (Yale: Yale University Press, 2013), 21.

11 An 1822 edition of Lemprière’s Bibliotheca Classica, or Classical Dictionary can be found at https://archive.org/details/aclassicaldicti01lempgoog.

12 The articles in question attacking “the Cockney School of Poetry” were written by ‘Z’ (John Gibson Lockhart) in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine from 1st August 1818, and by John Wilson Crocker in the Quarterly in April 1818.

13 An interesting account of Keats’s stay in Winchester can be found here: https://literarywinchester.org.uk/authors/john-keats-1795-1821-2/

14 Letter to Fanny Brawne, 16th August 1819. Rollins, Hyder Edward, The Letters of John Keats, vol 2 1819-1821 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958, 2012), 141.

15 Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, September 17-27, 1819. Rollins, Hyder Edward, ed. Letters, Vol 2, 1819-1821, 193. Spelling modernized.

16 The full letter can be found at http://keats-poems.com/to-john-hamilton-reynolds-winchester-september-22-1819/

17 Newey, Vincent, “‘Alternate Uproar and Sad Peace’: Keats, Politics and the Idea of Revolution” in The Yearbook of English Studies 19 (1989), 288.

18 Newey, Vincent, “‘Alternate Uproar,’” 288.

19 The undisputed champion of the purely aesthetic approach is Helen Vendler who, among other fine readings of the poem, has compared its mood to that of Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning”.

20 Published in MLN 94, 5 (December 1979): 988-1032.

21 From Keats’s letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 14th February-3rd May, 1819: http://www.john-keats.com/briefe/140219.htm.

22 Turley, R. M., J. E. Archer and H. Thomas, “Keats, “To Autumn” and the New Men of Winchester,” The Review of English Studies. New Series 63, 262 (Nov 2012): 797-817.

23 Keats, John, Poems (London: J.M Dent & Sons, 1969), 192.

24 Poole, Robert, “The March to Peterloo: Politics and Festivity in late Georgian England,” Past and Present 192 (2006): 109-155. See also ‘Polyp,’ Eva Schlunke and Robert Poole, Peterloo: Witnesses to a Massacre (Oxford: New Internationalist Publications, 2019). Poole, Robert, Peterloo: The English Uprising, published by the Oxford University Press in 2019, is widely considered to be the definitive account of Peterloo.

25 “The Trees,” in Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), 166.

26 Magnusson, Paul, Reading Public Romanticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 5.

27 Mizukoshi, Ayumi, Keats, Hunt and the Aesthetics of Pleasure (New York: Palgrave, 2001) has a chapter on “The Aesthetics of Nature,” which develops the politics of the pastoral of Leigh Hunt and John Keats in terms of a class struggle between the Tory literary establishment and the ‘Cockney School.’ The perspective I wish to open up is complementary to her arguments, and adds to an already promising area of research.

28 The tree of idleness appears in Bitter Lemons and in the poem entitled “The Tree of Idleness.” To the latter Durrell appended the following note: “The title of this poem is taken from the name of the tree which stands outside Bellapaix Abbey in Cyprus, and which confers the gift of pure idleness on all those who sit under it.”

29 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Essai sur les origines des langues (1781). Available in French at http://www.espace-rousseau.ch/f/textes/origine_des_langues.pdf.

30 Keats, John, letter to John Taylor, February 27th, 1818.

31 Poole, “The March to Peterloo,” 145.

32 For the House of Commons debate on the question, see Hansard, 14 March, 1821.

33 https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/ministers-under-pressure-to-revoke-law-which-makes-it-illegal-to-sleep-rough-as-10-people-a-week-prosecuted-1012306

34 The Poetical Works of John Keats, F.T. Palgrave ed., (London: Macmillan, 1884), 278.

35 Written in March 1818 and published in Leigh Hunt, Literary Pocket-Book, or Companion for the Lover of Nature and Art (London, C. and J. Ollier, 1819).

36 Roe, John Keats: A New Life, 302ff. Roe’s discussion of “To Autumn” (353-356) emphasizes its affinity with Leigh Hunt’s thoughts in The Examiner of 5 September 1819. Roe affirms that the “three richly-laden stanzas” offer a “harvest-home” for the downtrodden defended in Hunt’s ‘Calendar of Nature’ and, on the other, Roe suggests that Leigh Hunt’s journalism secured a favourable reception to Keats’s poem, concluding that “such images of natural liberty assured Keats’s poem a hearing even amid the noisy, disorderly debates ignited by the Manchester outrage.”

37 Letter to J.H. Reynolds, Feb 19, 1818.

38 Roe, John Keats: A New Life, 327.

39 The expression is taken from Seamus Heaney, Field-Work (London: Faber & Faber, 1979), 56.

40 On this question, the most famous account is Max Weber’s in The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905).

41 Rollins, Hyder Edward, ed., The Letters of John Keats. Vol 2, 1819-1821, 193. Spelling modernized. My emphasis.

42 For more on Keats’s view of revolution and historical change, see Thomas Reed’s analysis of “Hyperion” in “Keats and the Gregarious Advance of Intellect in ‘Hyperion’” ELH 55, 1 (Spring 1988): 195-232.

43 Ecclesiastes 3: 1.

44 Letter to J. H. Reynolds, February 19th, 1818.

45 Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, [1821]. My emphasis. For an excellent discussion of the opposition between the Utilitarian Bentham and the aristocratic Friedrich Schiller’s views of Labour value, see Richard Adelman, Idleness, Contemplation, and the Aesthetic, 1750-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

46 « Les philosophes de l’Antiquité enseignaient le mépris du travail, cette dégradation de l’homme libre ; les poètes chantaient la paresse, ce présent des Dieux. » Trans. Charles Kerr, as The Right to be Lazy (1883).

47 “In Praise of Idleness” was first published in Harper’s Magazine in October 1932. It was reprinted in In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays in 1935, and again by Routledge in 2004. It is available online at https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/. It has been translated into French by Michel Parmentier as Eloge de l’oisiveté (Paris: Eds. Allia, 2002).

48 Russell, In Praise of Idleness, 1935, 28-29.

Top of page

References

Bibliographical reference

Helen Goethals, Poetry and politics in the aftermath of Peterloo: John Keats’s ode “To Autumn”Caliban, 65-66 | 2021, 143-161.

Electronic reference

Helen Goethals, Poetry and politics in the aftermath of Peterloo: John Keats’s ode “To Autumn”Caliban [Online], 65-66 | 2021, Online since 20 October 2021, connection on 03 December 2023. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/caliban/10169; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/caliban.10169

Top of page

About the author

Helen Goethals

Helen Goethals, retired Professor of Commonwealth Studies at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, continues to explore the links between poetry and politics. The Unassuming Sky: The Life and Work of Timothy Corsellis (2012) and Tributes to Derek Walcott: In Various Light (co-edited with Eric Doumerc, 2022) were both published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. She is currently working on an article about Shelley's Hellas and the politics of the open air.

By this author

Top of page

Copyright

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

Top of page
Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search