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John Keats, Romantic Scotland, and Poetical Purposes
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This chapter explores the background to Keats’s 1818 tour to the English Lake District and Scotland, placing the tour in relation to his other travels. I then focus on Keats’s awareness of Scottish poetry, Walter Scott’s Waverley novels Guy Mannering and Rob Roy, and contemporary theatrical versions of those novels staged in London, Exeter, and Teignmouth. Seen in relation to ‘Meg Merrilies’ mania, 1815–17, and the romance of Rob Roy in spring 1818, Keats’s plan for a Scottish tour developed at a time when ideas of Romantic Scotland had caught the public imagination, and appeared to offer material for a fresh bid for poetic fame. Influenced by Milton’s Lycidas, Gray’s Bard, and myths of the Titans and the Celts, however, Keats’s decisive act was to step away from Scotland as popularized by modern writers to discover the origins of his projected epic Hyperion, and of poetry itself, on Scotland’s remote west coast.
Title: John Keats, Romantic Scotland, and Poetical Purposes
Description:
This chapter explores the background to Keats’s 1818 tour to the English Lake District and Scotland, placing the tour in relation to his other travels.
I then focus on Keats’s awareness of Scottish poetry, Walter Scott’s Waverley novels Guy Mannering and Rob Roy, and contemporary theatrical versions of those novels staged in London, Exeter, and Teignmouth.
Seen in relation to ‘Meg Merrilies’ mania, 1815–17, and the romance of Rob Roy in spring 1818, Keats’s plan for a Scottish tour developed at a time when ideas of Romantic Scotland had caught the public imagination, and appeared to offer material for a fresh bid for poetic fame.
Influenced by Milton’s Lycidas, Gray’s Bard, and myths of the Titans and the Celts, however, Keats’s decisive act was to step away from Scotland as popularized by modern writers to discover the origins of his projected epic Hyperion, and of poetry itself, on Scotland’s remote west coast.
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