Keats and the Poetics of Climate Change, 1816 and Beyond

Abstract

In 1816, Europe experienced the ‘Year Without a Summer’, following the Tambora eruption of 1815. Critical discussions of the literary responses to this event have usually focused on the writings of Byron and the Shelleys, who were living in Switzerland at the time. But one of the other second-generation Romantic poets also produced a profound literary response to the unseasonable weather, which has not received sufficient critical attention. John Keats was studying botany in 1816, and his course of study required him to be outdoors making detailed observations about the behaviour of plants. This chapter argues that the contents of Keats’s first published volume, the 1817 Poems, were decisively shaped by the climatic conditions of 1816. Building on work by Jonathan Bate and Marjorie Levinson, it traces the effects of Keats’s botanical observations on his writing and on his poetic identity in this volume and considers the way in which the mature odes of 1819 might be re-read within a wider consideration of Regency climate change. Finally, it turns to twenty-first-century poetry on climate change to argue for the legacy of Keats’s vision in our historical and climatic moment.