In John Keats’s two masterpieces, “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the bird and the urn induce the poet to enter the world of his poetic imagination. While these have been interpreted in many ways by critics, this paper discusses the role of the music emanating from the two figures, in triggering the poet’s trajectory of inspiration, rapture and disillusion. The music is heard when the poet is in ecstasy with the nightingale and the urn, and it ceases as he accepts sadly that he cannot stay eternally with them in the world of his poetic imagination.

  Through the poet’s imagination, the nightingale gradually becomes a bird of art, and the artificial urn reveals the world of nature. The poet finally realises that he is a mortal, quite different from the bird, but similar to the figures engraved inside the urn. In reality, however, the nightingale is a bird of nature, and the urn is an artefact. Keats discovers the similarity between nature and art in his world of poetic imagination, with music as the medium that connects him with reality and imagination. Since music is related to Apollo and has the power of seducing the poet in his imagination, it is associated with the poet’s inspiration. The moment when the music starts represents the sweet moment of the birth of poetry.

  The paper contends that Keats’s notion of music and poetry in the two odes is related to his individual maturity as he confronts and accepts the reality of his mortal destiny. In the context of the poet’s personal growth at the time he was writing the two odes, I argue that the music in “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” makes the poet realise the disparity between reality and imagination, his idea of humanity and art. The music indirectly represents Keats’s matured philosophy about poetry.

Wordsworth and Coleridge, who composed Lyrical Ballads (1798), seem to have anticipated that the public would also need experimental composition of poetry at a time when conventional views, feelings, and ways of thinking were beginning to be renewed in response to the tide of political and social change at the end of the 18th century. Basing on the undifferentiated publishing culture of printers, publishers and retail bookstores, it is supposed to have been a big problem for co-authors, Wordsworth and Coleridge, and bookseller, Cottle to publish this experimental book to lead to sales, and to continue stable sales.

  In addition to deviating from traditional poetry, for Coleridge’s political reasons, the book seems to have been carefully prepared for publication in anticipation of negative reception from critics, the government, and the public. For this reason, this paper considers how the three persons each worked on the means of publication, and their strategy of publishing, aiming for the success of the publication. This paper focuses on Cottle’s retention of the exclusive right to print, Wordsworth’s composing the Advertisement of the first edition and the Preface to the second and third editions, critics’ reviews of the book, and Coleridge’s revising his own style.

  On the exclusive copyright, the difference of opinion between Wordsworth and Cottle is considered, and as a result, it can be said that Cottle’s holding of the right led to sales because of his having no negative influence on the government and society. On the Preface, this paper examines the difference from the Advertisement, and changes of Wordsworth’s writing tone. At the same time, some critics’ reviews of this book are analyzed to know its influence. On Coleridge’s revising his style, this paper returns to the beginning plan of composing two types of poems when this book was invented, and major changes in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” are considered to have been necessary due to critics’ reception.

William Wordsworth’s nature is basically a benign presence that comforts and sympathises with humans, while it is sometimes indifferent to human affairs and self-restorative as can be seen in “Hart-leap Well.” On the other hand, his Guide to the Lakes (1835) and “Kendal and Windermere Railway” (1844) express concern about nature being irreparably damaged by human activities. How are these inconsistent images of nature—transcendent but sympathetic and healing, resilient but fragile—connected in Wordsworth’s view? This essay considers the question from the perspective of the mutual care in several meanings including sympathy, attention, protection, and maintenance between man and nature, examining three representations of gardens depicted in “The Ruined Cottage,” Home at Grasmere and The Tuft of Primroses, which would later be respectively revised and incorporated in The Excursion (1814). First, I trace the evolution of Wordsworth’s ideas about “caring nature”— how, from MS. B to MS. D of “The Ruined Cottage”, and to the widower’s garden in Home at Grasmere, the image of nature changes from something indifferent to human suffering to a presence that sympathises with man. I also examine how the idea of gaining solace and regenerative power by caring for green things developed into the idea of reciprocal care between man and nature, through the poet’s practice of gardening at Dove Cottage, which is fancifully described in “A Farewell.” Then I consider how Wordsworth’s ideas about “nature to be cared for” evolved, by examining his lament for the massive felling of trees in Grasmere and the abandoned and desolated garden of the Sympson family, expressed in The Tuft of Primroses. Here I will also refer to Select Views in Cumberland, Westmoreland and Lancashire (1810) to explore Wordsworth’s idea of landscape as a joint work of nature, time and human activities — or a satoyama landscape. Lastly, I will reveal how Wordsworth’s ideal of the relationship between man and nature is reflected in his revision of the representation of the Sympsons’ garden in The Excursion, which presents a community that has kept harmonious negotiations with the natural landscapes over a long period of time.

This essay argues that early-nineteenth-century Romantic literature is defined by its relationship to the era’s growth of the modern disciplines which eventually gained prominence around the mid-nineteenth century. The analytical milieu in which newly formulated scientific disciplines gradually earned intellectual legitimacy stimulated the Romantic poets to pursue a place within the presiding body of knowledge. As Wordsworth claimed: “Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge” (“Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, 1802).

  I will discuss how Keats’s poems adapted the language derived from medical science as a reflection of the cross-fertilization of branches of knowledge, which was attainable only before the new consolidation of modern disciplines. Medical science in the early nineteenth century triumphed in its central emphasis on the brain and the nervous system, witnessing their mediation of exterior perception and sensual experience, and effectively envisaging the elegant networks of the body. At this point historically, the term “sympathy” in the medical sense — rather than the usual application of human fellow-feeling — signified harmoniously corresponding functions connecting the distant zones of the body. Keats’s poetry in this extended conception of “sympathy” dynamically expands the range of textual interpretations, as in Endymion, where love and friendship — the close ties which unite human beings — are reconfigured as “sympathetic communication” between living creatures through the physically organized network of sensation.

  Previous to Romantic poetry, eighteenth-century moral philosophy had drawn extensively on the capacity of sympathy, as in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, where the concept functions as a vital element of fellow-feeling organizing the social world. However, the usage of the term “sympathy” as medical terminology gradually evolved in the nineteenth century to define, for example, the body’s nerve connections and vibrating fibers, lacking the sense of sympathetic communication. Nevertheless, without submitting or giving precedence to contemporary disciplines of knowledge, Romanticism’s fruitful association with the language rooted within a holistic conception of knowledge in eighteenth-century natural philosophy and the Republic of Letters manifests an eloquent “defence” of poetry.

Among Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s works, none were published with so sharp a consciousness of the expanding reading public in a changing landscape of media as The Friend. It was originally published as a stamped weekly newspaper in 1809–10, and reprinted and edited as a book thereafter. The Friend was initially intended to arouse broad public opinion while simultaneously seeking to enlighten its readers on moral and intellectual grounds, reflecting the internal tension between journalism and philosophy in Coleridge’s mind. This article explores his ambivalent views on journalism and chronologically traces how his attitude toward his subscribers changed during the publication of The Friend. This shift reveals the practical process by which his sense of enlightenment gradually emerged, culminating in its 1818 book version, where his demand on the readers’ effort of thinking turns into a philosophical ideal of reading attitude.

 The article primarily discusses Coleridge’s view on William Cobbett’s Political Register, which he perceived as a model for The Friend. Furthermore, it examines the complex nature of his consciousness of maintaining independence as an author while attempting to be a public voice. I then particularly focus on Coleridge’s correspondences from September/October 1809, when he ran out of stamped papers and had to request his collaborators to procure new ones. This is where, to secure a high-quality readership, Coleridge began to justify his “obscure” style (instead of improving it for clarity), even describing it as a virtue of philosophical reading. Although The Friend embodies his conscious attempt to establish a counter form of media at the transitional stage of mass journalism, Coleridge ended up fostering a closed community of intellectual readership, never leaving off his style that could only reach readers from the middle and upper-middle classes. Thus, The Friend is a historical product that had the potential, but ultimately failed, to produce a form of knowledge that would unify journalism and philosophy.