‘Later Flowers for the Bees’: Keats and Pollination

Abstract

In this essay I propose that John Keats's bee imagery may have been informed by the idea of insect pollination, an idea that was widely socialised if as yet unorthodox in his time. I locate Keats's clearest expression of such an idea in an 1818 letter, and articulate some of its social, sexual, and political implications. Reading pollination into four of Keats's poems, Isabella, Lamia, and, in a more substantial way, ‘On Fame’ and ‘To Autumn’, I contend that the idea is both enriching to our understanding of his poetry and consistent with the theories he develops in his correspondence.