SOURCE: Haworth, H. E. “‘The Virtuous Romantics’—Indecency, Indelicacy, Pornography and Obscenity in Romantic Poetry.” Papers on Language & Literature 10, no. 3 (summer 1974): 287-306.

In the following essay, Haworth discusses censorship and self-censorship surrounding the poetry of the Romantics, claiming that the Romantic poets and their critics anticipated the puritanical sensibilities of the Victorians.

While revising “The Eve of St. Agnes” for publication, Keats decided to make his narrative line clearer to his readers by adding a stanza early in the poem explaining the rites Madeline is about to undertake, and also by making the sexual consummation of the love scene between Porphyro and Madeline more explicit, only to meet violent objection from his publisher's reader, Richard Woodhouse. Woodhouse wrote Keats's publisher, John Taylor:

As the Poem was orig^y written, we [italics Woodhouse's] innocent ones (ladies & myself) might very well have supposed that Porphyro, when acquainted with Madeline's love...