The living pantheon of poets in 1820 against a larger body of alternative poetry Whether we wish to argue that Keats eschews politics, ideology, and the everyday in his poetry, or whether we want, with Jerome McGann, to argue that these are deeply reactionary poems,35 we need to see that his verse acquires some of its power from arising within a contemporary struggle over the power of poetry, both its aesthetic power and its power to change minds No matter which canon we embrace, it should be understood as an interested act of replacing the encyclopedic pantheon of the living poets with the sacred book of the anthology which seeks to keep alive poets by interring them far from the affiliations and conflicts that gave their poetry life NOTES On the issue of anthologizing Romanticism, see, e.g., the special issue of Romanticism on the Net (August 1997) Stuart Curran, “Romantic Poetry: Why and Wherefore?,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed Stuart Curran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p 217 Shelley, “England in 1819,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed Donald H Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 2nd edn., (New York: W W Norton, 2002), pp 1, 2–3 Subsequent references in the text Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed James Engell and W Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), vol i, p 38 Among other good work on print culture and Romanticism, see Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Paul Magnuson, Reading Public Romanticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) See J R de Jackson, Annals of English Verse: A Preliminary Survey 1770–1835 (New York: Garland, 1985), and Romantic Poetry by Women: A Bibliography 1770–1835 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) On the importance of drama and theatre to the period, see, among other good work, Julie Carlson, In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, and Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Jeffrey N Cox, In the Shadows of Romance: Romantic Tragic Drama in Germany, England, and France (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1987); and Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1779–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) On Satire’s importance to Romanticism, see Gary Dyer, British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Steven Jones, Satire and Romanticism (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000) William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) See also Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987) 10 See, e.g., James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), pp 303–49 31 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008