This image of Keats as an acolyte of beauty is very familiar to us, yet there are problems with it. In particular, the poems which are most often cited as exemplifying this aestheticised Keats—that is to say, the odes published in 1820 (principally “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, and “To Autumn”)—are, it would seem, not the kind of poetry Keats ultimately wished to write. If we take seriously what Keats says about “negative capability”—the great positive example of its possession being Shakespeare, and the great negative example of its lack being Coleridge—then this theory of literary selflessness seems to push Keats towards at least narrative poetry, if not even as far as poetic drama. But Keats’s dramatic works, Otho the Great and the fragmentary King Stephen, are usually passed over in awkward silence.

Not only does the aestheticised image of Keats tend to put the highest value on poems which there is good reason to think Keats himself would not have rated so strongly. It also dismisses from serious attention some poems altogether—those verses normally labelled “Fugitive Pieces” or “Trivia” in editions of his poetry. The Keats whose devotion was to beauty cannot be allowed to have had any serious talent for light verse, or whimsicality, or satire, and the poems of that character he wrote are therefore pushed to one side with disdain. Nor can the aestheticised Keats have had much interest in politics—his conception of his poetic calling must have been too high-minded for such earthly commitments. And yet some of Keats’s first reviewers caught political implications in his verse. Lockhart’s jab at what he called this “bantling” poet who had learnt from Leigh Hunt to “lisp sedition” shows as much. So too does The British Critic’s resentment of “a jacobinical apostrophe” in the opening lines of Book III of Endymion:

The radicalism sensed by the conservative reviewers of Keats’s own day is not something that can easily be accommodated by today’s critics of an aesthetic bent.