‘Honour to the Woods Unshorn!’: Honour to bold John Barnard!

The essay takes off from John Barnard's Warton Lecture on ‘Keats's “Robin Hood”, John Hamilton Reynolds and the “Old Poets”’. Since the lecture was delivered in 1989, additional contexts for the poem have become visible in the light of twenty-first century environmental concerns with deforestation. Keats's preoccupation with tree-felling in his poem on ‘Robin Hood’ can be fruitfully understood in the context of the 1818 enclosure of Sherwood Forest and the breaking up of British warships in the years after Napoleon's final defeat in 1815. The fate of mature oaks during wartime and afterwards, as highlighted by Keats, speaks to twenty-first century environmental concerns with the careless destruction of the natural world and the need for more sustainable policies.