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

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.