[This is a note to an essay on W. Holman Hunt's painting Isabella and the Pot of Basil]
G. B. Shaw claimed that Keats's indictment of the cruel brothers' capitalist exploitation anticipated Marx ("Keats," in The John Keats Memorial Volume, edited by G. C. Williamson [London, 1921]; cited by Morris Dickstein, Keats and His Poetry: A Study in Development [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971], 159). Most modern critics, including Dickstein, find Keats's political aside a lamentable lapse. See also Carl Woodring, Politics in English Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 80-81.
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