Sexist

John Bayley

• John Keats by John Barnard
  Cambridge, 172 pp, £22.50, March 1987, ISBN 0 521 26691 2
• Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare by R.S. White
  Athlone, 250 pp, £25.00, March 1987, ISBN 0 485 11298 1

The artist Benjamin Haydon said of Keats, probably with affectionate disapproval, that ‘one day he was full of an epic poem! – another, epic poems were splendid impositions on the world, – never for two days did he know his own intentions.’ Haydon’s canvases have something in common with Keats’s more ambitious poems in that they lack the basic confidence of genre; they are trying to do something new according to an old recipe. It was a Romantic dilemma, and the fact that anything could be tried out made what might be termed a natural originality difficult to obtain. The many ‘modernisms’ of the 20th century found it much easier. In terms of style and genre, Wordsworth and Coleridge continued to rely on the 18th-century tradition of ballad and didactic poem, while Byron had successfully romanticised the more robust traditions of Dryden and Pope. Keats would read himself into style through a much more unstable and challenging model-Shakespeare.