John Keats’s Calidore: Unfolding Layers of Adversity and a Glimpse at Limits of Chivalry

This article scrutinizes how John Keats’s early poem Calidore, included in his first volume entitled Poems (1817), reshapes Edmund Spenser’s manifestation of chivalry in The Faerie Queene (1596). Keats crafts the titular protagonist by reworking the Knight of Courtesy, namely Sir Calidore in Book VI of the same work by Spenser, illuminating Keats’s contrary perceptions of the traditional modes of the Knight’s conducts, which concern his quest to subdue the Blatant Beast symbolizing the destructive power of social cohesion. Reflecting these heroic deeds of Spenser’s character, Keats highlights the moral and spiritual valor of his own figure. The author, who predominantly engages with the concept of ambivalence throughout his literary career, also initiates the limits of the chivalric manner and tenets in facing tribulations, which entail external and internal dilemmas. Keats’s emphasis on his double-edged view of idealistic morals and their contrasting harsh realities serves to establish tragic parallels to idealism as a recurring motif in his later works embedding romance and fairy narrative tales.