Fifteen Eighty Four

The English poet John Keats died in 1821, and almost immediately his friend Joseph Severn began working on the portrait of Keats that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Severn painted from memory, capturing Keats sitting among his books – one of which he is reading –  in his home at Hampstead Heath. Keats, sitting in one chair with his elbow on the back of another, is the very model of the solitary poet. The empty seat he uses as an armrest symbolizes absence, the person with whom Keats might sit and chat and laugh were he not so consumed by his reading. He is, to quote his own “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” “alone and palely loitering.”

Except Keats wasn’t alone. Severn was there to take in the scene, of course, and in fact Keats regularly visited with friends. Contrary to what Severn’s portrait would suggest, Keats was part of a vibrant social circle that included painters, physicians, lawyers, not to mention other poets. Keats and his fellow writers would engage in friendly sonnet competitions, sitting together and scribbling rhymes for fifteen minutes before sharing what each had written. A few of these sonnets went on to be published. Still, despite the wealth of criticism on the social world Keats inhabited, it is Severn’s version of Keats as the isolated, serious, contemplative poet that persists.

Joesph Severn, John Keats, 1821-1823, oil on canvas, National Portrait Gallery (London)

In fact, the Romantic celebration of the individual – and here I am not referring to just Keats – continues to dominate our understanding of all forms of cultural production, from music to art to literature to less popular (and indeed decidedly unpopular) forms such as literary criticism. If in the sciences and social sciences it is common to see multiple-author articles, it is rather more rare to see them in the humanities, where the monograph remains the standard of achievement.  I had this romantic “monographilia” in mind when I accepted the invitation to edit The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race.

I saw the Companion as a collective effort to push back against Romanticism’s aggressive individualism and, importantly, to reflect upon the racial dimensions of that very individualism – the paleness of Keats’s loiterer. It was, I felt, essential that the fourteen of us who produced the volume be in regular dialogue, that we think together through the numerous and varied ways that Romanticism was informed by and informed (and continues to inform) race-thinking. Over several months, each contributor presented their ideas to the group, opening up conversations about  blackness and Romantic understanding of beauty; European expansion and representations of indigeneity; and scientific explanations of racial difference and the material history of slavery. As a consequence of these ongoing discussions, the volume strikes me less as a collection of individual essays than a single collective essay spread across multiple chapters.

The front cover of the Companion features a stunning portrait by Kehinde Wiley, a revision of Caspar David Friedrich’s famously Romantic Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818). In Friedrich’s painting, we see a lone white man, here atop a cliff looking down upon a nebulous rocky landscape. It’s not a far cry from Severn’s Keats portrait, in which the poet travels not across a sublime landscape but through the imagined “realms of gold/And many goodly states and kingdom” that Keats found in Homer’s epics or the pages of Shakespeare’s King Lear that he “burn[ed] through” (that’s an engraving of Shakespeare hanging in the background of Severn’s portrait). Wiley’s version, The Prelude (Babacar Mané), substitutes the figure of a Black man (the Senegalese dancer Mané) for Friedrich’s white wanderer. The title at once alludes to Wordsworth’s book-length self-reflection, The Prelude, and suggests that Wiley’s work stands not as an imitation of Friedrich’s, but as its precondition. Before Friedrich could romanticize his European subject he had to occlude the nonwhite subject that Wiley centers. The Prelude, then, brings everything hidden in the fog beneath Friedrich’s figure-on-high to bear on the Romantic tradition.

Such a reckoning was our goal in putting together this volume, as well, and it’s one of the reasons I’m as enamored of the Companion’s back cover as I am of the portrait on the front. The back lists all the contributors: Yoon Sun Lee, Catherine R. Peters, Deanna P. Koretsky, Mathelinda Nabugodi, DJ Lee and Aaron Ngozi Oforlea, Essaka Joshua, Travis Chi Wing Lau, Joseph Albernaz, Devin Garofalo, Nikki Hessell, Atesede Makonnen, Lauren Dembowitz, and Yasser Shams Khan. These are the my collaborators, my interlocutors, and, importantly, my teachers, the ones from whom I learned about not just the complex intersecting histories of Romanticism and race, but also the possibilities for inquiry that open up when we abandon the (white) myth of the (white) solitary wanderer and turn to each other to guide us through the fog.

The Cambridge Companion
to Romanticism and Race
by Manu Samriti Chander