Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare and John Keats's 'On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again' (1818)

Lisica, Flora (2024) Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare and John Keats's 'On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again' (1818). Notes and Queries. (In Press)

Abstract

This article presents a new reading of the relationship between the poetry of John Keats, and the work of Samuel Jonson, and the two writers’ readings of Shakespeare. Keats is known to have been critical of Johnson’s approach to Shakespeare; he owned a copy of Shakespeare’s plays containing Johnson’s commentary, and Keats’s marginal annotations make his disagreements with Johnson apparent. But this article shows that Keats’s sonnet ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’ (1818) praises Shakespeare by alluding to Johnson’s ‘A Preface to Shakespeare’ (1765), and suggests that Keats’s conception of what poetry ought to achieve more broadly appears to be indebted to Johnson, as well. The article therefore makes the case for unexpected common ground between the way that Johnson and Keats think about Shakespeare, and about the significance of poetry at large.

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