John Keats at Winchester

Abstract

Nicholas Roe reflects on why Keats came to Winchester, and what he wrote while staying there. His chapter explores the range of meanings that Winchester’s founding father King Alfred took on for Keats, bringing new pressure to bear on the poem most closely associated with the market city: ‘To Autumn’. Roe’s concern is to place the ode in relation both to Winchester’s historical associations and to its great presider, King Alfred. In fascinating detail, Roe’s sensitively attuned reading allows us to see how the ode’s language and imagery are closely related to Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon language and liberties, in often surprising ways.