J. Formichella
Notes

2. The Language of Interpretation in Romantic Poetry; in Romanticism and Language, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984, p. 35n.

3. `Alone and Palely Loitering: The Reader in Thrall in Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci";Style,Spring 1990, 24:1, 73-88.

4. "The Language of Poetry and the Language of Criticism: Keats's `La Belle Dame Sans Merci' and the Modern Reader," in Poetry and Epistemology, Roland Hagenbuchle and Laura Skandera, eds., Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 1986, p. 373.

5. It may be that Bennett’s reading couldsupport either stanzaic ordering; he apparently chose not to pursue the possibility. He does offer enough evidence that he considered the implications of the different texts--especially with the title change from Merci to Mercy--to suggest he didn’t find this change significant. Theresa Kelley, in a piece which Bennett refers to, says of this change, “This new sequence presents a different view of the protagonist’s role in his own enthrallment. Rather than simply succumbing to the belle dame, he now seems to invite her to enthrall him” (337).

6. English Romantic Writers, 1119.

7. It is a topic which was especially burdensome for Keats, as almost everyone has commented. On the one hand, what legitimate criticism could be launched at his early poetry focused on his lack of education; on the other, is the suggestion that Keats's experience was through study alone.

ELH, Summer 1987, 54:2, p. 356n.

9. The White Goddess, New York: Vintage Books, 1948, see esp. p. 480.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid. p. 482.

12. Ibid.

13. John Keats, ed. By Elizabeth Cook, New York: Oxford UP, 1990, p. 606n.

14. There are some textual discordances betweenLa Belle Dame[and the Rhymer ballad which make the kind of argument Graves presents extremely difficult, regardless.

< a name = fn12> 15. Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of A Style, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. p. 89n.

16. "The Familia Regis and the Familia Cupidinis," p. 100.

17. "The Hope for `Plesaunce': Richard Roos' Translation of Alain Chartier's La Belle Dame Sans Mercy," p. 119.

18. Green, p. 100.

19. ibid. p. 101.

20. ibid.

21. Times Literary Supplement, p. 14.

22. Green, p. 100.

23. Jones, p. 14.

24.John Keats, p. 418.

25. “Women and Words in Keats (with an Instance fromLa Belle Dame sans Merci), in The Mind in Creation, J. Douglas Kneale, ed., McGill: Queens UP, 1992, pp 69, 61.

26. Ibid. P. 155n.

27. Tetreault, p. 154n, where he quotes both Bates and de Man: "we are reading the work of a man whose experience is mainly literary."

28. Giving us, technically, as Levinson points out, "a poem that, like its hero, hangs fire. The frame device, while it seems formally to resolve the work's doctrinal and dramatic contradictions, only recapitulates them. It is not, after all, the minstrel who concludes, as is customary in a framed ballad" (48). Could it be that Keats, in revising the ballad, sought to rectify this by having the minstrel "wretched wight" conclude it? (Bennett has suggested, convincingly, that the change in the title from Merci to Mercy brought the poem closer to the Medieval French of Chartier rather than contemporary English: Does this support the earlier question about Keats's intentions?)

29. Commentators, Bennett, for one, have suggested that a "Lady by the lake" was indeed a euphemism for a prostitute.

30. For the text of the poem I am referring to Kelley's article, 360-362, where she has placed the letter version, complete with corrections, the Brown transcript as found in Stillinger (1978), and the Indicatortext, side by side.

31. "From Symbol to Sign," p. 64.