“Epistle to J. H. Reynolds”:

This essay examines the significance of cockney Keats’s cultural value and his cockneyfied ekphrastic representation in a broader sociocultural context in relation to Romantic visual culture rather than anchoring John Keats from a fixed political perspective. By investigating his deep involvement in the metropolitan visual culture along with his interactions with cockney friends, Hunt and Hazlitt, this essay posits that Keats was an influential cultural figure who facilitated the incoming metropolitan visual culture. First, the essay examines how Keats interacted with the metropolitan visual culture by reading his letters and biographical accounts, after which it explores how Hunt and Hazlitt affected Keats’s ekphrastic representation, which reflected the Cockneys’ aesthetic cultural aspirations peppering the poet’s imagination. While analyzing the poem “Epistle to J. H. Reynolds,” the essay focuses on how Keats reshaped Claude’s The Enchanted Castle on his imaginative ekphrastic canvas. Although Keats’s cockneyfied aesthetic cultural gesture deviated from conventional norms, the essay argues that it was an exemplary literary and aesthetical response to the metropolitan visual culture.