Knight or Wight in Keats's 'La Bella Dame'?: An Ancient Ditty Reconsidered

Abstract

This article re-examines the various processes of textual transmission for Keats's 'La Belle Dame sans Merci', which have resulted in two 'competing' texts of the poem. It argues that a medieval model of textual production offers a strategy for dealing with this circumstance, and that, approached in this way, there is no need to resolve the textual 'problem' that the poem poses.