ABSTRACT
First published in The Indicator, I, 10 May 1820, pp. 246–8. Keats composed ‘La Belle Dame Sans Mercy’ in April of 1819 and sent a copy of the original version to his brother and sister-in-law in a journal letter of 14 February to 3 May 1819. The initial published version here in The Indicator contains a number of important variants from the original draft, particularly in the artificial archaisms. Many editors of Keats have preferred the original version, though Jerome McGann has made a compelling case for the calculated irony of the Indicator version and the ‘Caviare’ signature (‘Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism’, in The Beauty of Inflections (Oxford: Clarendon P., 1988, pp. 15–65)). Many editions of Keats’s poetry now offer both versions, and most mention Hunt’s prefatory material on Keats’s debt to Alain Chartier. Hunt’s introductory essay, however, has never been reprinted, and it rarely enters into the critical controversy over the two versions of Keats’s poem. Without attempting to impose a resolution here, we do emphasize that restoring Hunt’s material provides a fuller contextualization of how Keats’s published poem appeared to its first generation of readers. Hunt’s comments on romantic love, for instance, would have established a progressive, if not radicalized, political setting for Keats’s poem associated with Hunt’s recent Examiner defences of sexual freedom in Shelley’s poems (see headnote above, pp. 144–7) and the attacks by ‘Z’ in the Cockney School essays on Hunt’s own sexual license in the incestuous plot of The Story of Rimini (see headnote above, pp. 142). To identify the complete print context of this initial publication of Keats’s poem, we also note that the first two-thirds of this Indicator issue contain an English translation of Rousseau’s theatrical version of the Pygmalion story.
