John Keats
George Bernard Shaw stated, “Keats achieved the very curious feat of writing a poem of which it may be said that if Karl Marx can be imagined writing a poem instead of a treatise on Capital, he would have written Isabella.” Shaw’s view clashes with that of most mainstream critics who deny Keats any political thought and declare him a worshiper of some unspecified beauty. This month marks the 200th anniversary of Keats’s death and is an opportunity to spend a moment reclaiming this revolutionary romantic.
The English and then the American and French revolutions had demonstrated at European level and beyond, the irreversible arrival of capitalist society. Conservative governments across Europe understood and feared the implications of these revolutions and reacted with increased conservatism and suppression of democratic movements. Although Britain already was a bourgeois society, it now feared insurrection by the working classes and became a repressive regime itse