The French Revolution made political freedom no longer an accidental byproduct but a regulative ideal of political life. The loosening of the bond between political power and religious belief helped to liberate the idea of the modern self, exultant and anguished in its stubborn, impossible dream of freedom. But the period in which these huge ideas began to swell and then, like continental plates, to slide apart, is also one of incredibly swift and promiscuous interchange between them. Romantic scholarship of the last twenty years or so has been galvanised by this apprehension. The picture that emerges of the Romantic period is of a humming switchboard of energies and influences, sparking and crackling between the divergent, but not yet distinct realms of art, philosophy, science, politics, economics, religion and technology.
Daffodils sit amid dark satanic mills.
The great testaments to Truith, Beauty and passion in Romantic art consort with writings on murder, mesmerism, addiction, electricity and window-shopping. Andrew Motion's biography of John Keats borrows from and itself assists this enlarging agitation of Romanticism. Quietly, tenaciously, insists that we see the high achievement of Keats's work in terms of its rootedness in the world rather than its recoil from it. He gives us fine-grained accounts of Keats's schooling, his medical training, and the culture of dissent which energised so much of his writing. In particular, he reveals the close and continuous relationship between Keats's poetic practice and his political ideals, along with his vigorous, and unabating disgust at the brutal authoritarianism of his times, which reached its climax in the Peterloo massacre of 1819.