j e f f r e y n c ox to a standard sense of the Romantic, as Keats and Shelley are recouped as poetic allies of Wordsworth rather than political comrades of Byron and Hunt, and as a masculine line of lyric verse comes to define an age filled with women writers, dramatists, and poetic tales What occurred within the institutionalization of Romantic poetry was a victory of a Victorian version of a Wordsworthian vision of the period that enabled scholars not only to limit the list of important writers but also to limit the work even by those writers to a lyric encounter between the self and nature While much good work has been done in reorienting Romanticism around Blake, and while we have seen recent attempts to rethink Romanticism from the position of a Byron or a Shelley or to redefine Romanticism to include the work of women writers, we have yet to arrive at a clear enough sense of how Romanticism arose in opposition not only to old or other modes of poetry but also to itself As we continue to map the literary field within which Romanticism arose, we need to see that it was indeed a battlefield Hypercanonical Keats and the pantheon of living poets All these long lists and old controversies might seem mere antiquarianism, an attempt to recover a body of work that serves no contemporary interest, aesthetic or otherwise However, an awareness of the range of poetry available in 1820 can alter our understanding of even the most canonical of Romantic works, for example Keats’s 1820 volume, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems Placed back in its moment of production, Keats’s book announces its connections to a broad range of poetry while staking out Keats’s place as an innovator as he adopts a revisionary stance toward the popular tale, the canonically enshrined ode, and the epic, traditionally considered the highest form of poetry The poems we care most about in Keats’s 1820 volume are the odes (and Shelley’s 1820 Prometheus Unbound volume, while dominated by a drama, also included a sustained exploration of the ode in poems such as “Ode to Heaven,” “Ode to the West Wind,” and “Ode to Liberty”) But we might think about these odes differently if we did not place them in a tradition of the philosophical or sublime ode, marked by such masterworks as Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode and “Ode to Duty,” or Coleridge’s “Ode to the Departing Year” and “Dejection: An Ode,” but instead thought about them alongside the then better-known odes written for public occasions, such as Byron’s “Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte,” Wordsworth’s Thanksgiving Ode of 1816, and the various odes Southey wrote in his position as Poet Laureate, including his “Ode for St George’s Day,” written in 1820, with its celebration of 26 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008