Serpent’s Tongue: The Byronism of Lamia

Abstract:John Keats’s Lamia was shaped by interrelated anxieties that troubled the poet throughout 1819. These anxieties centered on the cultural power of women readers but ramified to include Lord Byron as well. Borrowing the story of Lamia from Robert Burton but also presenting his serpent-heroine as a metonymy for the western canon, Keats uses his poem to lament the parodic feminization of canonical norms on the Regency literary scene. Yet this cultural debasement, he suggests further, must also be blamed on Lord Byron, who has made himself Regency England’s star poet in part by theatrically catering to the ladies. My essay invokes Regency criticism of Byron as an audience-manipulating poseur to argue that Lamia’s amatory career restages Keats’s ambivalence about Byron, allowing Keats to seek a broader readership through an experiment in Byronic role-playing while also indicting Byron for his insincerity and cynicism.