A political impulse and proof on the pulses

With Endymion out, Keats relaxed into a sociable spring and hoped for better reviews than the forecast of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine May issue. Bailey got his praises into an Oxford paper, and more favor (probably via Reynolds) came in The Champion. But The British Critic was savage and by summer's end The Quarterly and Blackwood's piled on. Keats's sights were already set on new work. He headed north for a walking tour with Brown and kept writing – sonnets (on Robert Burns, on the summit of Ben Nevis, on beholding Ailsa Rock), a meditative ramble, and doggerel (an amusement for his sister, “There was a naughty boy”). His new project had been in prospect since January, when he reread King Lear. Explaining his ambition to Haydon (go-to interlocutor on matters heroic) Keats pledged that the “sentimental cast” of Endymion would yield to “a more naked and grecian Manner,” with forward thrust: “the march of passion and endeavour will be undeviating.” Unlike “mortal” Endymion, “led on, like Buonaparte, by circumstance,” his new hero, Apollo, “being a fore-seeing God will shape his actions like one” (23 January 1818; K 88).

The reference to Napoleon was loaded. Defeated at Waterloo (June 1815), the emperor-general left the liberal hopes of a generation in disarray. The seeming savior of the Revolution's principles and rattler of monarchal cages all over Europe had turned imperialist and tyrant. Coleridge, ardent Liberal in the 1790s, likened him to Satan in pride, vanity and sheer evil.