Andrew Bennett, Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ISBN: 0 521 44565 5 (hardback) Price: £30 ($49.95)

'Disturbing', 'uncertain', 'scandalous', 'suffocating', 'conflicting', 'unsettling', these are just a few phrases by which Bennett, in the opening paragraph of his book Keats, Narrative and Audience, characterises Keats's poetry. Firmly grounded in the writings of John Bayley, Christopher Ricks and Marjorie Levinson, which, in recent years, have all concentrated on the 'disruptive forces' of Keats's work, Bennett argues that 'Keats's poetry engages, above all, with the figure of solecism' (p. 2). If early scholars expressed their annoyance and embarrassment with the 'smokeable', 'overlanguaged' Keats by a telltale silence, the last two decades have witnessed a quantitatively important increase of critics revelling in exactly this aspect of Keatsian phraseology. The reductionist question which often underlies these studies is: what is it that makes great poetry? To put it simply: Is poetry writing the perfect words in the perfect place; or is it exploiting language in a more subversive way by means of a highly personal, unpredictable diction? The latter notion, of course, is more 'Romantic' and seems particularly applicable to Keats. Commenting on the 'Hyperion poems', Bennett can be caught sympathising with the poet's 'Cockney' idiosyncrasies: 'the "faultures" [a Keatsian solecism] by which the narrative is organized, the liminal stratifications of narrative embedding, provide rich picking for the eyes of avaricious readers' (p. 156). As can be inferred from the above quotation, Keats's solecisms, according to Bennett, go beyond the lexical level and clearly manifest themselves within the structural organisation of his poems. The aim of Bennett's book, then, is not so much to record the factual reaction of Keats's reading public towards these distortions (i.e. expressions of his unique, individual voice?), as to find out what kind of reception he anticipated himself—maybe unconsciously so—by inscribing certain narratorial strategies in his poetry. As a matter of fact, early frustrations and disappointments led Keats to believe that he was only writing for a posthumous audience; again, Bennett claims, a fundamentally Romantic conception. It has been argued before that the Romantics showed considerable anxieties about their audience because its growing opacity, the result of socio-economic and technological developments, was causing a rift between the writer and the reader. The very instability of the audience generated a similar instability in poetic discourse, with poets desperately seeking 'redemption in an ideological defence of solipsism, private vocabularies and mythologies' on the one hand, and expressing 'an intense desire to be read and to be understood, a belief in the revolutionary redemptive powers of literature itself' on the other (p. 30). Since the presence of an audience is a prerequisite for the existence of narrative, the Romantics, bewildered by the daunting indistinctness of their contemporary reading public, deferred their productions towards future generations of readers. A statement in one of Keats's letters, that 'one of the great reasons the english have produced the finest writers in the world; is, that the English world has ill-treated them during their lives and foster'd them after their deaths' seems to corroborate Bennett's belief that Keats envisaged posterity as the real addressee of his poetry. Appreciating that the topic of Romantic posterity certainly begs for a more elaborate treatment than is provided in the present book, Bennett intends to publish a study entirely devoted to the subject within the near future. Possible questions to which I would like to find a more conclusive answer are: what warrants the claim that it is exactly during the Romantic period that 'posterity [becomes] the necessary ground of artistic production' (p. 9) (is not this the trope of (Western) Art itself, independent of any literary movement?); and how did the Romantics come to prefer …