SOURCE: "Keats's Lipsing Sedition," in Essays in Criticism, Vol. 42, No. 1, January, 1992, pp. 36-55.

In the following essay, Roe suggests that one of the reasons Keats's politics and poetry were largely neglected by his contemporaries, and why his political interests are rarely recognized even today, was due to an effort by critics such as John Lockhart to discredit Keats as a man and a poet. Roe maintains that Lockhart and others took such measures because they recognized Keats's potential for subversiveness, and for threatening the "discourse of masculine authority" and the "prevailing codes of manliness."

Keats's friend Richard Woodhouse wrote in his copy of Endymion, 'K. said, with much simplicity, "It will easily be seen what I think of the present Ministers by the beginning of the 3d Book"'.¹ One can see readily enough from the opening of Endymion Book III that Keats was unimpressed by the government...