University of Virginia Library

2

In his "Introduction," Stillinger makes a cogent case for selecting 1817, 1818, and 1820 as copy-text for the forty-five poems in these volumes. He argues that the first editions reflect Keats's final intentions more fully than holograph drafts or early transcripts. Adducing documentary evidence that the poet shared with his publishers a "spirit of collaboration" (see fn. 3 above), Stillinger concludes that "it would be a violation of Keats's intentions to prefer MSS to printed versions as copy-text for any of the poems in the three original volumes" (p. 13). In light of this position, Stillinger's decision silently to emend indentation in at least sixteen copy-texts is puzzling. If his edition aims to "represent, for each poem, as exactly as can be determined, the form Keats himself would have preferred above all others" (p. 1)—and if the first editions contain these "forms"—then emendation of indentation in "sonnets and other stanzaic forms" seems, in an editorial sense, self-defeating.

In addition, Stillinger's silent emendation alters the reader's aesthetic and interpretive apprehension of at least several poems. The sonnets "How many bards" and "O Solitude," for example, in Stillinger's edition lose the appearance of Petrarchan, and take on that of Shakespearian sonnets. (Indenting 10-11 as well as 2-3 and 6-7 makes 9-12 resemble a third quatrain rather than part of the sestet.) And there is an interpretive as well as formalistic argument for reading these poems as Petrarchan sonnets.[7] But even if this were not so, Stillinger's editing would still have altered the subtle interplay of syntax, rhyme, and stanzaic form that contributes to poetic meaning.

Finally, this aspect of Stillinger's landmark edition is ahistorical.[8] Precisely

because Keats wrote at a time of great stanzaic experimentation, his textual inconsistencies are an important part of the literary-historical record. The editorial impulse to regularize seems, in relation to his texts, anachronistic: clearly remote from his distinctly irregular age.

An implicit explanation of Stillinger's policy of silently emending indentation may be found in his apparatus: by classing indentation with such features of the text as "typographical peculiarities of titles" and the use of dots rather than asterisks to separate stanzas (p. 683), he invites his reader to conclude that indentation has only presentational significance. But one need not be a hard-line formalist to find this faulty reasoning and poor literary theory. Surely, as critics like Wellek and Warren have pointed out,[9] patterns of line indentation affect poetic meaning, and not only in the cases of shaped or concrete poetry. It therefore seems incumbent upon editors of scholarly texts to retain copy-text indentation unless there is a compelling, historical reason to alter it. Indeed, copy-text indentation merits the respect due a significant manifestation of authorial intention.