University of Virginia Library

"The texts are edited according to the ideal of 'final authorial intentions'; that is, they are supposed to represent for each poem, as exactly as can be determined, the form that Keats himself would have sanctioned and preferred over all others" (p. 1).

I have repeatedly collated Stillinger's edition with numerous copies of each original volume, including the following: two copies of 1817 in the J. Pierpont Morgan Library, three in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, and one in the Columbia University Library; three copies of 1818 in the Berg Collection and one in the Houghton Library at Harvard University; four copies of 1820 in the Berg Collection, one in the Morgan Library, and one in the Columbia University Library.

Pp. 12-13. Stillinger borrows the phrase, "spirit of collaboration," from G. Thomas Tanselle's "The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention," SB, 29 (1976), 167-211 (reprinted in Tanselle, Selected Studies in Bibliograph [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979], pp. 309-353). In this article, which importantly influences Stillinger's editorial policy, Tanselle argues that "it is possible for someone other than the 'author' to make alterations which are identical with the intention of the 'author,' when the relationship partakes of the spirit of collaboration" (p. 191).

Throughout I use Stillinger's, rather than first edition, titles for individual poems.

Allott, in her generally well-received edition of Keats (The Poems of John Keats [1970]), describes the "regular ten-line stanza [of the odes], consisting of one quatrain from a Shakespearian sonnet followed by the sestet of a Petrarchan sonnet . . ." (p. 523).

The five copies of 1820 I collated all agree on the indentation of stanza six. However, a 1922 "reprint" of the volume (London: Humphrey Milford) agrees with Stillinger. I cannot account for this discrepancy and under the circumstances feel compelled to prefer primary to secondary evidence.

In both works there is (as one expects in a Petrarchan sonnet) a clear interpretive as well as formal division between the octave and the sestet, with the final six lines modifying the point made in the first eight. Specifically, the octave of "How many bards" describes the "pleasing" intrusion of "throngs" of previous bards on the poet's mind when he "sit[s] down to rhyme." The sestet, a single sentence beginning with the comparative conjunction "so," likens the "chime" of these poets to "the unnumber'd sounds that evening stores," thus strengthening the sense that the "bards" are welcome to "intrude" on the poet. Similarly, the sestet of "O Solitude" (also a new sentence beginning with a conjunction) modifies the desideratum of the octave—solitary communion with nature—by preferring to it natural communion with a "kindred spirit." The Petrarchan pattern of line indentation in these poems highlights the crucial interpretive break between ll. 9 and 10, encouraging the reader to perceive ll. 9-14 as a sestet.

The argument for historicism in scholarly editing is succinctly made by Tanselle in "Recent Editorial Discussion and the Central Problems of Editing" (SB, 34 [1981], 23-65): "The most basic distinction is between editions in which the aim is historical—the reproduction of a particular text from the past or the reconstruction of what the author intended—and those in which the editor's own personal preferences determine the alterations to be made in copy-text. Scholarly editions conform to the first approach . . ." (p. 60).

See René Wellek and Austin Warren, "The Mode of Existence of a Literary Work of Art," in Theory of Literature (1942; rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956): "the role of print in poetry is by no means confined to . . . rare extravaganzas; the line-ends of verses, the grouping into stanzas, the paragraphs of prose passages . . . and many similar devices must be considered integral factors of literary works of art" (p. 144).