¹ Central in defining Keats's intentions hitherto has been the letter of 21 September 1819 to J. H. Reynolds, describing the mood of pleasurable observation that initiated To Autumn. See The Letters of John Keats, ed. H. E. Rollins (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), ii, 166–68: “Chaste weather—Dian skies—I never liked stubble fields so much as now—Aye better than the chilly green of the spring.”

² Despite the fact that he noted a repressed, or “absorbed,” elegiac mood in the poem, Walter Jackson Bate established definitively its overall optimism (John Keats [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963], pp. 581–82). For a recent restatement, see Stuart M. Sperry, Keats the Poet (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 336–42.

³ Hartman, “Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats's ‘To Autumn,‘ ” Literary Theory and Structure, ed. F. Brady, J. Palmer, and M. Price (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1973); rpt. in The Fate of Reading (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 124–46.

⁴ Freeman, “Keats's ‘To Autumn’: Poetry as Process and Pattern,” Language and Style, 11 (1978), 3–17.

⁵ “The Role of Linguistics in a Theory of Poetry,” Daedalus, 102 (1973), 231–44.

⁶ The edition used throughout is John Keats: The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1973).

⁷ In the “Autumn” letter to Reynolds (ii, 167), Keats described his having “given up Hyperion—there were too many Miltonic inversions in it—English ought to be kept up.”

⁸ This point was made trenchantly by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, in “Surfacing from the Deep,” Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature, 2 (1977), 151–53, a review of another paper by Freeman. The idea was first suggested to me by Stanley Fish, to whom this sentence is insufficient acknowledgment.

⁹ Eugene R. Kintgen, in “Is Transformational Stylistics Useful?” College English, 35 (1974), 821, objects to transformational analysis of literature as often being a fancy, or even obscurantist, restatement of things otherwise understood. It is hard to disagree with his proposal that communication will be best served “if the simplest, most public theory is used.”

¹⁰ They seem a direct refutation of phrases in Bate's reading that suggest a shadow of anxiety in the poem: “the strain of the weighty fruit,” “a funeral dirge for the dying year” (pp. 582–83).

¹¹ Elsewhere Keats associated poppies with imaginative brainsickness, as in Endymion, I, 554—72, or with escapism, as in his letter to Fanny Brawne of 1 July 1819: “do all you can to console me … and make it rich as a draught of poppies to intoxicate me.”

¹² John Dryden, The Works of Virgil, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), p. 106.

¹³ See Ralph Cohen, The Unfolding of the Seasons (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 237–43, for Thomson's use of the Georgics.

¹⁴ James Thomson, Complete Poetical Works, ed. J. L. Robertson (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1908).

¹⁵ William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets, in Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe (London: Dent, 1930), v, 90.

¹⁶ Thomson, Castle of Indolence, in Works, p. 256.

¹⁷ This passage has been persuasively (but differently) analyzed by Christopher Ricks, in Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), pp. 123–28.

¹⁸ Jones, John Keats's Dream of Truth (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), pp. 15–16. There is still another extraordinary anticipation of the georgic “kernel” in Endymion, where Endymion berates himself for inaction:

¹⁹ See M. R. Ridley, Keats's Craftsmanship (Oxford: Clarendon, 1933), pp. 288–89, for an analysis of Keats's drafts of the poem.

²⁰ Hartman, “Poem and Ideology,” p. 129.

²¹ Ridley, p. 288.