In December 1817, at the home of Tom Monkhouse , 22-year-old John Keats was introduced to 48-year-old William Wordsworth , the increasingly conservative poetic elder statesman. 3 At the urging of his friend Benjamin Robert Haydon , Keats read from his forthcoming poem Endymion . 4 Haydon’s recollection of the meeting (in a letter to Edward Moxon on 29 November 1845) is worth quoting at some length:
When Wordsworth came to Town, I brought Keats to him, by his Wordsworth’s desire—Keats expressed to me as we walked to Queen Anne St East where Mr Monkhouse Lodged, the greatest, the purest, the most unalloyed pleasure at the prospect. Wordsworth received him kindly, & after a few minutes, Wordsworth asked him what he had been lately doing, I said he has just finished an exquisite ode to Pan—and as he had not a copy I begged Keats to repeat it—which he did in his usual half chant, (most touching) walking up & down the room—when he had done I felt really, as if I had heard a young Apollo—Wordsworth drily said
‘a Very pretty piece of Paganism—
This was unfeeling, & unworthy of his high Genius to a young Worshipper like Keats—& Keats felt it deeply—so that if Keats has said any thing severe about our Friend; it was because he was wounded—and though he dined with Wordsworth after at my table—he never forgave him.
It was nonsense of Wordsworth to take it as a bit of Paganism for the Time, the Poet ought to have been a Pagan for the time—and if Wordsworth’s puling Christian feelings were annoyed—it was rather ill-bred to hurt a youth, at such a moment when he actually trembled, like the String of a Lyre, when it has been touched. 5
Haydon’s recollection of this exchange (to which he was the only witness) occurred twenty-eight years after the event, so we might take his story with the proverbial grain (or perhaps handful) of salt. Though we have no definitive proof beyond Haydon’s belated account that Keats was “wounded” by or “never forgave” Wordsworth , Keats certainly recorded many ideological and personal differences with the older poet in numerous letters. 6
Regardless of Keats’s alleged feelings, Haydon’s story demonstrates two ideas that inform this project: first, the nature of the younger Romantics’ “paganism”; second, the ways in which that paganism was read as both tasteless and dangerous by their critics, by the religious and political establishments, and even occasionally by first-generation Romantics such as Wordsworth and Southey .
Wordsworth’s “unfeeling” dismissal of the “Hymn to Pan” as “a Very pretty piece of Paganism” unintentionally identified a theme of key importance to the young Romantic writers: a reclamation of the mythology and imagery of the classical world characterized not only by philosophy and reason (as it was for many of their eighteenth-century predecessors), but also by wildness, excess, and ecstatic experiences—all of which registered as decidedly un-Christian (even anti-Christian) and potentially subversive.
This episode illustrates that Romantic paganism was subject to both interpretation and controversy, and Wordsworth’s was not the only critical voice that objected to the influx of pagan classicism in the poetry of this period. The younger Romantics’ paganism was a locus where the connected fault lines of politics, religion, and aesthetics converged. When Keats paced up and down the room “chanting” expressions of joyous paganism in lines about hamadryads, fauns, and the “satyr king” Pan, Wordsworth (along with much of the critical establishment) would have heard a former apothecary student-turned-protégé of notorious radical Leigh Hunt glorying in the sensual excesses of a classical world he had no cultural right to appropriate.
Then and now, Romantic paganism raises specific questions about the literature of the period that otherwise go unasked or asked incompletely, such as: What is the importance of the art, literature, and mythology of the classical world within the framework of Romantic historicism and literary influence? What connections do we miss when we fail to recognize that approaches to the classical world form a key aspect of the younger Romantics’ intertextualities? What do we lose when we dismiss most of these writers as atheistic because they rejected Christianity as bloody, gloomy, and repressive, even though they themselves suggested that their political and social goals were more aligned with ancient paganism than with atheism?
Keats was hardly alone with his so-called “pretty paganism.” In the middle of the second decade of the nineteenth century, Percy Shelley—who until then had never paid more than passing attention to classical themes—began to adopt figures such as the Delphic Pythia , Dionysus , and maenads who embodied the pagan ideals of excess, radical selflessness, unrepressed sensuality, and ecstasy (in the Greek sense of “standing out of oneself” as well as the most common contemporary Oxford English Dictionary usage, “the state of trance supposed to be a concomitant of prophetic inspiration”). In a study adorned with newly acquired busts of Apollo and Venus , Shelley translated the Homeric Hymns and Plato’s Symposium , read Homer , Aeschylus , and Sophocles , and drafted his “modern eclogue,” Rosalind and Helen (1818), “On Love,” and “A Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love” (both 1818). He also composed verse abounding with images of ecstatic abandon, including the “wild spirit” and “fierce maenads” of “Ode to the West Wind” (1820), the selfless “extacy” of “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (1817), the transformative power of music in “To Constantia” (1817–1818), and the culmination of his pagan poetics, Prometheus Unbound (1819).
Even in death, Shelley was a pagan. In his account of the burning of Shelley’s and Edward Williams’s bodies after they had drowned in a boating accident in Italy, Edward Trelawny notes that he was careful to acquire for the ceremonies “such things as were said to be used by Shelley’s much loved Hellenes on their funeral pyres.” 7 Williams’s “shapeless mass of bones and flesh” was burned first, and Trelawny, Byron , and Hunt “threw frankincense and salt into the furnace, and poured a flask of wine and oil over the body. The Greek oration was omitted, for we had lost our Hellenic bard.” 8 Their “Hellenic bard” Shelley was cremated the following day, and Trelawny describes how the same pagan ceremonies were performed over his disfigured remains: “After the fire was well kindled we repeated the ceremony of the previous day; and more wine was poured over Shelley’s dead body than he had consumed during his life.” 9 Shelley’s last rites—the funeral pyre and the ritualistic votives of oil, wine, and spices—were characterized by the same pagan spirit that had animated his final years.
These same years also witnessed an abundance of pagan themes in the productions of Shelley’s peers, friends, and collaborators, including Leigh Hunt’s “Bacchus and Ariadne” (1816) and “The Nymphs” (from Foliage, 1818), Hunt’s and Vincent Novello’s Musical Evenings (1820–1821), Thomas Love Peacock’s Calidore (1817) and Rhododaphne (1818), Mary Shelley’s Proserpine and Midas (both written 1820), Barry Cornwall’s “The Rape of Proserpine” (1820), John Hamilton Reynolds’s The Naiad; a tale, with other poems (1816), Horace Smith’s Amarynthus, the Nympholept: A Pastoral Drama , in Three Acts. With Other Poems (1821), and Keats’s Endymion (1818). These works and numerous others experiment with ancient genres and poetic forms while endorsing the democratic ideals of fraternity and community—or what Keats called the “Spirit of Outlawry” 10 —as well as the unrestrained sensual pleasures that characterized the aesthetic agenda of this circle.
These “pretty paganisms” did not exist solely in the writers’ published works. In their letters to one another, this circle repeatedly referred to itself as “pagan,” “Bacchic,” or “Athenian,” and they described a private world in which Pan danced through the Marlow woods and friends spent afternoons reclining on turf couches to sing and read Catullus together. Modern critics have called the circle “the Cockney School” because that was the epithet hurled at the young poets by Blackwood’s and The Quarterly Review , but that is not what they called themselves; most of them preferred “The Athenians.”
Shelley’s letters invoked the Greeks as “gods” (plural), 11 teased Peacock (who often signed his letters “yours in Pan”) about nympholepsy and “Bacchic fury,” and requested that Peacock act as priest to the Shelleys’ household Penates in their absence. Thoma...