ABSTRACT
In the opening lines of his 1818 poem, conventionally titled “Robin Hood: To a Friend,” John Keats infamously rebuffs his friend and collaborator John Hamilton Reynolds’s sonnets’ fanciful depiction of the outlaw with a defiant “No! those days are gone away.” He follows this proclamation with a lengthy lament for the lost outlaw that, while clearly elegiac, functions as more than a simple “exercise in nostalgia.” Instead, the Robin Hood Keats laments forgoes the gentrified, romantic image commonly found during the period and is conversely described in markedly medieval terms. The outlaw legend had experienced a resurgence during the romantic period, likely attributed to Joseph Ritson’s publishing of his volume of Robin Hood tales in 1795, and, while there is no evidence that Keats himself had read the work, it has often been noted that the outlaw motif “was one which seems to have been in the air.” Yet, rather than drawing upon the gentrified image of Robin Hood utilized by contemporaries such as Walter Scott and Thomas Love Peacock, Keats instead appropriates the outlaw figures of the Middle Ages, specifically drawing from The Tale of Gamelyn and A Gest of Robyn Hode. The purpose of this study is to examine the reasoning behind Keats’s choice to return to the medieval Robin Hood legend as opposed to relying on more contemporary renditions. Specifically, I will argue that Keats’s choice to evoke the outlaw of the early ballads is influenced by his own well-documented political standpoints, particularly his dislike of militarism and landlordism. Through careful analysis of this poem and his medieval sources, I intend to demonstrate that, by rebuking the contemporary vision of Robin suggested by Reynolds and instead choosing to pay tribute to the outlaw stories of the Middle Ages, Keats reclaims Robin Hood as a force for social change.
