Keats and Pope, each the beneficiary of John Barnard's scholarly attention, are typically understood to be inimical kinds of writer. This essay considers how Keats's superficial antipathy to Pope masked a kinship of sorts, fostering the young poet's sense of self and shaping his formal choices in early works including Endymion. Pope in turn may have been closer to an awkwardly Cockney spirit and rule-breaking, impure vocabulary than Keats tended to assume; for both poets, the feminine realm presented an enthralling alternative to the subject matter that might otherwise have engaged what Auden once nominated the ‘strict and adult pen’.
Johnston et al. (Wed,) studied this question.