Work

Resurrecting rhymes, reasons and (no) rhotics: Reconstructing Keats’s pronunciation

Year: 2025

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: This paper reconstructs the pronunciation of the English Romantic poet John Keats — and in particular the likely original sound of one of his final poems, Bright Star — just over two hundred years after his death (1821). Keats makes a particularly fascinating phonological study due to Lockhart’s (1818) denunciation of him as a ‘Cockney poet’. I use evidence from contemporary pronouncing dictionaries and several other treatises and orthoepical works from the early nineteenth century to narrow down likely pronunciation variants in 1819. I then employ evidence from Keats’s own rhyme schemes (more concrete) and biographical details relating to his location, education, and social and literary milieu (more speculative) to construct a likely rendition of Bright Star in the poet’s own voice.

Source: White Rose Research Online (University of Leeds, The University of Sheffield, University of York)

Author: Sen, R.

Language: English

Topic: Linguistics and language evolution

Subfield: Language and Linguistics

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

OpenAlex ID: W7033969436

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