SOURCE: "Keats, History, and the Poets," in Keats and History, edited by Nicholas Roe, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 165-93.

In the following essay, Newey explores the influence of other poets' political ideals on Keats and argues that Keats was "rather more conservative in outlook than is commonly assumed. " Newey states that despite Keats's "libertarianism and exposure of abuses," he appears to have assumed the superiority of the English over other cultures while favoring democratic, anti-authoritarian ideals.

Keats's relation to 'the poets' is as much a factor in his thought and writing as are the fall of Napoleon or civil unrest in England, Waterloo or Peterloo, the public events which recent scholarship has rediscovered as not only the backdrop to his work but vital constituents of its meaning.¹ To observe this relation is not, it should be said, to walk a blind alley of 'reflexiveness', where the subject of...