Roe’s Keats, although devoted to poetry, is also open to other literary possibilities. For Roe, Otho the Great is not merely the false step it has seemed to be to so many other critics, and he takes seriously the possibility that, had he lived, Keats might have pursued a career in the theatre. Even more arrestingly, Roe is also impelled by his reading of the letters to imagine Keats’s pursuing a quite alternative literary path:
Throughout Keats’s letters and poems we have seen vivid glimpses of a novelist in the making, suggesting that in the 1830s and ’40s he might have rivalled Dickens, then turned his awareness of life’s ironies into moments of vision like Thomas Hardy’s, or even joined Hunt,whose insights about consciousness and time prefigured Virginia Woolf’s.
This startling vision of Keats as a rival to the young Dickens has the benefit of bring- ing more to the centre of our attention the lighter verse which critics have tended to leave on the side of their plates, like so much unpalatable gristle. Roe, however, wolfs down even this rejected fare with gusto: “If The Fall of Hyperion was a venture along some darker passages of his psyche, The Cap and Bells gives us a streetwise Keats as he walks by gaslight to an evening drink and talk with friends.”
Finally, Roe’s Keats still harbours radical sympathies, as Roe had suggested in his first book. But Roe now allows the radical touches in Keats’s poems to emerge with less strain, and his discussion of those potentially radical details implicitly acknowledges their occasional faintness or slightness. As he says of “To Autumn”:
When we turn from Hunt’s “Calendar of Nature” to Keats’s poem, its three richly laded stanzas appear as a harvest-home for England’s “less fortunate multitude”: a lock of hair is “soft-lifted” to float free on a “winnowing wind”; a furrow is abandoned “half-reap’d”; the gleaner—an archetype of poverty and exclusion—becomes a figure of steady purpose; and swallows, still gathering, announce their imminent departure while keeping at bay Keats’s fateful word “gone”. Under a new moon’s Dian skies, such images of natural liberty assured Keats’s poem a hearing even amid the noisy, disorderly debates ignited by the Manchester outrage.
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