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Historical Linguistics 2022: Selected papers from the 25th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Oxford, 1–5 August 2022
Edited by Holly Kennard, Emily Lindsay-Smith, Aditi Lahiri and Martin Maiden
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 369] 2025
► pp. 5–19

Resurrecting rhymes, reasons and (no) rhotics

Reconstructing Keats’s pronunciation

| University of Sheffield
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.
Keywords: Late Modern English phonology, original pronunciation, Bright Star, Cockney, poetry
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background on Keats
  • 3.Bright Star
  • 4.Pronouncing dictionaries
  • 5.Cockney Keats
  • 6.Diphthongs
  • 7.Other features
  • 8.Conclusions
  • Author queries
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
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