According to traditional accounts, following the premature deaths of Keats, Shelley, and Byron in the 1820s, literature in England fell into a sort of slumber until the late 1830s and early 1840s, when a new generation-a generation we now call the Victorians-came on the scene. Literary scholarship has tended to ignore this period of slumber as an uninteresting gap between the two dynamic movements of Romanticism and Victorianism. It was during this transitional period, however, that Leigh Hunt, one of the most radical of Romantic figures, wrote and staged A Legend of Florence (1840) in an attempt to stimulate a literary revival. Hunt's play reasserts the radical philosophies that defined his younger days, when as the central figure of the "Cockney School" he had drawn other radical writers such as Keats and Shelley into his circle. These philosophies included the primacy of literature, political radicalism, sexual liberation, and group authorship. By writing a play in 1840 that reasserted these ideals, Hunt hoped to gather a new coterie following reminiscent of the Cockney School. Responses to the play from Hunt's younger Victorian contemporaries, however, demonstrate how Hunt's once radical "Cockney" ideals had now become relatively safe. The nostalgic fondness with which A Legend of Florence was greeted therefore highlights how in 1840 Romanticism was in the process of being absorbed into Victorian philosophy and aesthetics.

This thesis proposes two distinct but connected ideas: that John Keats’s idiom of friendship was haunted by “sequestered” longings and that he ultimately valued specific, one-on-one partnerships as a basis for his poetical character. The Introduction places the thesis within its critical context and outlines “paradoxical solitude,” a concept the poet expressed by joining a “kindred spirit” in a wilderness retreat in “O, Solitude.” I begin by examining the evolving role of solitude in Keats’s literary predecessors (Chapter I). I then trace the development of ideas of creativity and solitude from his 1814-1815 verse, including his first association with a coterie and the influence of Wordsworth (Chapter II). Building on these findings, I explore the poet’s introduction to the Hunt circle in 1816, assessing his relationships with its members and their overstated roles in the production of Poems (Chapter III). I then discuss how Keats regarded the composition of Endymion in 1817 as a poetic “test,” specifically tailored to reinforce his identity as a solitary poet (Chapter IV). I contend that Keats engaged in a dialogue of independence with Reynolds, adapted the theories of Hazlitt, and restlessly travelled throughout England as a means of rejecting the highly social periods of 1818 (Chapter V). I then consider the creative gains of his northern expedition with Brown in the summer of 1818. I argue that Keats exaggerated his development into a “post-Wordsworthian” poet, positioning himself outside both the coterie’s sphere and the reach of Blackwood’s criticism, and inspiring the theme of Hyperion (Chapter VI). In closing, I analyze Keats’s advice to Shelley to be a selfish creator of his poetic identity. Only through paradoxical solitude, I argue, was Keats able to construct the poetic identity that led him to compose the poems on which his fame rests in the 1820 volume.