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

2006; Edinburgh University Press; Volume: 12; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/rom.2006.0018

1750-0192

Richard Marggraf Turley,

Linguistic Variation and Morphology

Keats, Cornwall and the'Scent of Strong-Smelling Phrases' Richard Marggraf Turley Department of English University of Wales, Aberystwyth 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 risqué 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.1 '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 confined to the ethereal', Lockhart snipes insinuatingly, warning readers away from the young poet's 'prurient and vulgar lines'.2 My aim is to explore this disparity in Keats's and Cornwall's receptions, further elucidating what John Whale has recently referred to as the 'precariousness of taste, particularly in relation to romance and its representation of sexuality'.3 As we shall see, Cornwall offers an important, though neglected, context for understanding Keats's relation to the literary market-place. 1. 'Potent Rhymes' ———————— If we could ask a Romantic reader of new verse in 1820 to name the most exciting poet of the day, there is a strong chance he or she would answer – not Keats, Shelley or Leigh Hunt – but 'Barry Cornwall'. His first poems had appeared in the Literary Gazette in late 1817. By February 1820, under Hunt's tutelage, the 'rising poet' had published no less than three volumes of verse.4 His third collection, Marcian Colonna (1820) – an ambitious portrait of erotic fixation and violent emotions – sold700 copies on its first day of publication.5 As the novelist Mary Russell Mitford declared, 'everybody is talking about … Barry Cornwall's new poem'.6 For a less anecdotal perspective on Cornwall's contemporary reputation, William Hazlitt's suppressed anthology,FOOTNOTESelect British Poets (1824), allocated Cornwall nine pages – the same number as Keats, and more than Southey, Lamb or Shelley each received.7 In the volume's 'Critical List of Authors', Hazlitt praised Cornwall's 'brilliancy and tenderness of fancy'.8 Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine pronounced Cornwall a poet of 'originality and genius', contrasting him with the 'sottish' members of the 'Cockney School'.9 In 1821, a reviewer for Gold's London [End Page 102] Magazine declared that in terms of 'tenderness and delicacy' even Shelley was 'surpassed very far indeed by Barry Cornwall'.10 Lamb was a keen advocate, while Walter Savage Landor wrote eulogistically that 'No other in these later times / Has bound me in so potent rhymes'.11 Cornwall's reputation as a leading poetic light extended abroad. His first volume, Dramatic Scenes (1819), inspired two musical settings by Mikhail Glinka, and individual poems served as forerunners to Alexander Pushkin's Little Tragedies. Macabrely, the last thing Pushkin wrote before tending to hisfatal duel with d'Anthes was a note about translating Cornwall into Russian.12 Although he was feted in his own day, Cornwall is paid scant regard within current Romanticist scholarship. His reputation has fallen so precipitously, indeed, that critics routinely misspell his name.13 While Stuart Curran, a champion of marginalized Romantic writers, acknowledges him as one of the 'guiding voices' of a new literary culture that developed in England after the death of Byron, Keats and Shelley, Cornwall is usually dismissed as the author...