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Hunt's The Descent of Liberty and the Seasonal Politics of Keats's ‘To Autumn’

Hunt's The Descent of Liberty and the Seasonal Politics of Keats's ‘To Autumn’ Arnd Bohm Prague spring. A long, hot summer. The German autumn of 1977. The winter of our discontent. The use of the seasons for metaphors and allegories in political discourse is still familiar, but by no means of recent vintage. Season metaphors as in the following observations by William Hazlitt were typical for the Romantics: ‘yet we will never cease, nor be prevented from returning on the wings of imagination to that bright dream of our youth; that glad dawn of the day–star of liberty; that spring–time of the world, in which the hopes and expectations of the human race seemed opening in the same gay career with our own . . . ’.1 While the association between spring and a new political order seems natural, it is more difficult to recover the radical politics of autumn, a season that suggests quiet reflection and withdrawal into private spaces, not engagement with the troubled world.2 Not least, Keats’s poem itself has been used as a pretext for keeping politics out of autumn. The assignment of political meanings to the seasons appears to have begun with winter. The epithet ‘tyrant’ for winter entered the vocabulary as early as the opening http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Romanticism Edinburgh University Press

Hunt's The Descent of Liberty and the Seasonal Politics of Keats's ‘To Autumn’

Romanticism , Volume 15 (2): 131 – Jul 1, 2009

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Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Copyright
© Edinburgh University Press 2009
Subject
Literary Studies
ISSN
1354-991X
eISSN
1750-0192
DOI
10.3366/E1354991X09000610
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Arnd Bohm Prague spring. A long, hot summer. The German autumn of 1977. The winter of our discontent. The use of the seasons for metaphors and allegories in political discourse is still familiar, but by no means of recent vintage. Season metaphors as in the following observations by William Hazlitt were typical for the Romantics: ‘yet we will never cease, nor be prevented from returning on the wings of imagination to that bright dream of our youth; that glad dawn of the day–star of liberty; that spring–time of the world, in which the hopes and expectations of the human race seemed opening in the same gay career with our own . . . ’.1 While the association between spring and a new political order seems natural, it is more difficult to recover the radical politics of autumn, a season that suggests quiet reflection and withdrawal into private spaces, not engagement with the troubled world.2 Not least, Keats’s poem itself has been used as a pretext for keeping politics out of autumn. The assignment of political meanings to the seasons appears to have begun with winter. The epithet ‘tyrant’ for winter entered the vocabulary as early as the opening

Journal

RomanticismEdinburgh University Press

Published: Jul 1, 2009

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