“‘Tis more ancient than Chaucer Himself”

In Chapter 11, “Tis more ancient than Chaucer Himself”, Caroline Bertonèche looks at the link between Chaucer, Keats, and Romantic Polyphony. “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?”: the question is asked by John Keats in the last verse of To Autumn. From spring to autumn, we have here a cycle, or the end of a cycle, the four seasons – another of Keats’ poem – of an annus mirabilis (1819) that Keats chose to end in music (ll. 23-24, 28–34). As Helen Vendler remarked in The Odes of John Keats (1983), this musicality is a dissonant and muted polyphony; an English polyphony rather than a Romantic one. It is unsurprisingly through Chaucer that Keats’s poetry reached that polyphonic state: If he preferred Chatterton to Milton and Shakespeare to Milton, he also preferred Chaucer to Milton, precisely because Milton poisoned Keats’s mind through a fragmentation of writing that prevented him from completing The Fall of Hyperion. A Dream (1820).

What this chapter offers to study is not so much Milton’s “miltonisms” but rather Keats’s debt to Chaucer. Bertonèche tries to perceive, in this formal and geographical proximity between both poets, an affiliation that would define his romanticism around a unique production composed at the crossroad of different linguistic areas, genre variations, and babelisation of languages (English, French, and Italian).