Adonais

In Stanza XXXVI, the speaker takes a moment to suggest a most unusual cause for the death of Adonais/Keats: a literary critic. Politician and part-time journalist John Wilson Croker (1780-1857), of a generation just a bit too old to appreciate the radical ideas and stormy passions of the young generation of self-styled Romantics, used his influence at the Quarterly Review, at the time one of London’s most influential political and cultural forums, to eviscerate Keats’s ambitious “Endymion” (1818). At more than 4000 lines, Keats’s poem was a wide-ranging rumination on the elements of beauty as much as the despair and isolation of a poet forever in quest of elusive beauty. Indeed, the often-quoted line “A thing of beauty is a joy forever” is from “Endymion.” That Croker in London’s most read literary journal dismissed the poem for its clanky mechanics, its hyperbolic emotions, and its self-indulgent length was sufficient to cause Keats’s grievous melancholy. Shelley describes this melancholy as the “howling” from “one breast alone” (Stanza XXXVI, Line 7). Croker’s stance denied the poem’s “magical tone” (Stanza XXXVI, Line 5), and in turn drove Keats into a funk sufficient that he would not, could not fight off the tuberculosis. A critic, therefore, “killed” Keats. Shelley, in turn, eviscerates Croker and, in Stanza XXXVIII, damns the critic the only way he can: Live long, the speaker says, as John Wilson Croker, knowing you are an imposter without taste, a worm whose opinions are without merit. Shame, the poet knows, will eventually “burn” upon Croker’s secret brow (Stanza XXXVII, Line 8).

This nameless worm then symbolizes the hostility that greeted Shelley (and all the second generation of British Romantics) as they introduced radical themes, unusual forms, and celebrated a range of topics refined and conventional poetry did not, among them the passions, atheism, the glory of nature unassisted by a God, and supremely the elevated position (ego) of the poet.