Keats and Romantic Celticism

Keats and Romantic Celticism. By Christine Gallant. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 174 pp. 45.00 [pounds sterling] (hbk). ISBN 1-4039-4851-8

The usual image of Keats is of a man educated and sensitive beyond his status, aspiring to the not-yet-formed life of the metropolitan intellectual, and, as a result of this challenge to socio-cultural order, harassed by conservative snobs. This Anglocentric, class-based reading of romantic genius is challenged by Christine Gallant, who claims that Keats saw much of value in the Celtic traditions of Britain, which were largely mediated to him by the developing interest in folklore.

While she recognises that "traditional faery lore is an integral part of his major poems, early to late" (p. 2), Gallant also argues that "Celticism is as intimately a part of Keats's poetry as classicism" (p. 5), and goes so far as to suggest that "in his sympathies and his art, Keats was part of the movement that has been termed the Celtic Revival" (p. 22). This notional positioning, she claims, not only permitted self-realisation for the poet (she finds Ossianic moments throughout Keats's work and reads Thomas the Rhymer as an alter ego for the author) and also involved a deep-seated ancient British loyalty--she sees Hyperion as being about "the downfall of the Celtic empire" (p. 71)--but even helped him in his literary-political difficulties:

   Keats's emphasis on the Celts, Druids and faery lore ... was a
   powerful defense against the deprecations of one's self and one's
   group by the patrician English ruling group in power (p. 36).

The striking feature here is the extension of Keats's well-known and imaginatively prolific interest in faery lore into a specifically Celtic world. Gallant's arguments depend both on Keats's general activities and concerns, and also on the specifics of his poetry. The latter area is perhaps the easiest to test, and she seems to press the evidence too hard. She interprets The Eve of St Agnes as a poem with ballads by Scott as "originating source" (p. 89), including "distinct parallels" with The Daemon-Lover, and so, she argues, it has a direct line into Celtic material. Apart from the question of just how "Celtic," or Gaelic, Scott's material actually was--many would think it stops short of being folkloric--the case is weakened through Gallant's claim (or admission) that these connections have "gone unremarked." If the links really existed, that silence would be very surprising, considering the expertise, even obsession, that has gone into the study of Keats's sources. Keats himself said the The Eve of St Agnes was "based on a popular superstition" and Miriam Allott's notes link it to Romeo and Juliet, Mrs. Radcliffe, and perhaps the medieval Florice and Blanchefleur. She does give Scott a brief mention, but only for The Lay of the Last Minstrel (see The Poems of Keats, edited by Allott, pp. 450-1).

If the notional "Celtic" sources of The Eve of St Agnes appear improbable, Keats's text also seems overinterpreted in the same direction. Gallant finds "the turning point in the poem" to be the Celtic-connected lines 170-1, which reference the lovers' meeting to Merlin and from which the poem turns "darker and darker, and any resemblances to Shakespeare's lovers are left far behind" (p. 100). The structural point is fair, but is the link Celtic? Merlin is distantly Welsh enough, but he had long become a Romantic Gothic Figure (with a cave in Richmond Park), and Keats no doubt drew the reference from Southey's introduction to the 1817 edition of Malory, which stressed the medieval French versions of Merlin's tragic love-affair--Tennyson used the same source in The Idylls of the King.

Such Celtic material as Keats uses here, in a poem central to Gallant's argument (the discussion is ten per cent of the book), is in fact heavily mediated and in neither scholarly nor emotional terms is it like the work of the contemporary Celticists, who were exploring their own Scottish and Welsh traditions in a conscious resistance to English hegemony. Keats does make passing contact with such people when he attributes The Cap and Bells to "Lucy Vaughan Lloyd" and subtitles it "a faery tale." But the poem is far from London Welsh cultural politics, being urban satire called by critics "Byronic," but in fact its tone is closer to the prose of Peacock, whose wife was Welsh and might even have inspired the attribution.

Over-argued as Gallant's points can be, she still makes real contributions. Keats's interest in the work of Edward "Celtic" Davies has been overlooked: Davies associated the wandering Celtic tribes of early Europe with the Titans who interested Keats so much, and this idea, Gallant argues, reverberates in his work. She plausibly sees Glaucus, in Endymion Book III, as, in addition to his Ovidian name and links, having druidic features derived from Davies, and she argues with some credibility that both Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion "conflated the familiar narrative of the defeat of the Titans by the Olympians with the defeat of the British Celts by the Romans" (p. 67). She also sees the priestess Moneta in The Fall of Hyperion as a version of "the last of the Druids": the poem's Titan context means that this figure is more likely to be linked to Davies's extensive discussion of druidry than merely Romantic poetic and visual representations of such a figure.

At times Gallant sees Celticity where there is merely romanticised classicism--her "specific parallels" (p. 73) between Hyperion and a "Celtic" dreamer (and at that only an Ossianic one) are no more than sitting in silence by a fountain, forlorn speech, and foreseeing tragedy. At other times what there is of the Celtic world has been quite redirected by mediators such as Scott, French medievalism, or, especially, the "faery" worlds of Spenser and Shakespeare. But while it is improbable to suggest that Keats had "an ideological commitment" to Celticism (p. 83), and tenuous to convert his enjoyment in travelling in the Celtic regions into an initiating literary force, there is still a valid case to be made for Celticity, including in dilute form its politics, to have been part of the rich resources that were re-fashioned by this amazingly gifted poet. What Gallant does give her readers is a fuller understanding of one of the many ways in which Keats was a bard.

Stephen Knight, Cardiff University, Wales

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