The living pantheon of poets in 1820 Even Wordsworth offered his own kind of counter to popular romances in The White Doe of Rylstone; or, the Fate of the Nortons (1815), and then in Peter Bell The poets of 1820 offered a host of different kinds of tales: Croly called his The Angel of the World an “Arabian Tale,” and his Sebastian a “Spanish” one, which is how Mary Leman Grimstone also labeled her “Zayda.” Hunt offered his translation of Amyntas as “A Tale of the Woods.” Nodier’s Giovanni Sbogarro was translated as “A Venetian Tale (Taken from the French).” Caroline Bowles Southey published her Fitzarthur as a “Metrical Tale.” Bulwer Lytton’s first volume of poetry opened with “Ismael, An Oriental Tale.” William Herbert issued Hedin; or, The Spectre of the Tomb A Tale From the Danish History John Roby published Lorenzo, or The Tale of Redemption Mr Frankly printed his Omar and Zara, or, The Power of Truth, A Father’s Tale in Verse John Brown released Legitimacy, a Poem; or, Leonard and Louisa, A Tale for our Times; and “Old Tom of Oxford” published Solomon Logwood, A Radical Tale, with satire again providing modal variations on other forms Keats, identified on the title page of the 1820 volume as the author of his poetical romance Endymion, does not provide his three opening poems with generic markers, but they have long been recognized as innovative interventions into the contemporary construction of the romance or tale, a point which, again, can be fully appreciated only if we return these poems to the larger pantheon of poetry into which they were introduced Curran suggests that Keats’s three tales provide a synoptic history of romance offering poems “in the mode of the Greek (in couplets), Italian (in ottava rima) and British (in Spenserian stanzas).”33 Keats here may have been following Dryden, whose Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) also modernize classical (Ovid), Italian (Boccaccio), and English (Chaucer) romances, but he is also seeking to assert his experimental modernity by demonstrating that he can master and transform the entire range of romance We see similar gatherings of tales covering a range of models, usually to point toward a kind of world or global literature, so that Croly offers both a “Spanish” and an “Arabian” romance, or Procter produces two stories from Boccaccio alongside “Gyges,” a classical story in the style of Byron’s Don Juan, “The Death of Acis,” labeled “A tale Sicilian” (l 2), and “Diego de Montilla A Spanish Tale.” Procter provides a particularly good point of comparison for his fellow Cockney, Keats, for both are engaged in exploring world literature’s tales and more specifically in adapting Boccaccio, a project in which Keats would also be joined by Reynolds Like Procter, Keats, whose “Fancy,” also included in the volume, proclaims “Ever let the fancy roam, / Pleasure never is at home” (ll 1–2), 29 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008