Keats, Cornwall and the 'Scent of Strong-Smelling Phrases'

Abstract

Leaving aside our own estimation of the respective merits of Keats and 'Barry Cornwall', popular Romantic taste preferred the latter's slant on medieval Italian verse and his Elizabethan-styled dramatic 'scenes' -self-contained verse dramas - to the former's own Hunt-inflected corpus. One of the questions I wish to address is why did Cornwall - pseudonym of solicitor Bryan Waller Procter (1787-1874) - appeal so intensely to early nineteenth-century audiences in a way Keats emphatically did not? To claim that Cornwall's success lay in his ability to supply the wide taste for risqu� verse is not to tell the whole story. Keats was also a 'sensual' writer, and far from achieving saleable status he was roundly condemned for his 'emasculated prurience'.For many commentators, indeed, a sea of vulgarity lapped at the edges of Keats's work, nauseating conservative reviewers. 'Z.' (John Gibson Lockhart) publicly insulted Keats in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, labelling him a 'boy of pretty abilities' and couching criticism of his early paean, 'To Mary Frogley', in a barely concealed discourse of teenage onanism: 'Johnny's affections are not entirely...