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Title: How Keats Falls (John Keats) (Critical Essay)
Author : Studies in Romanticism
Release Date : January 22, 2011
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
Pages : * pages
Size : 215 KB

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KEATS'S HYPERION POSITS HUMAN FINITUDE AS THE BEGINNING RATHER than the end of aesthetic work. By "finitude" I mean not simply the awareness of death that informs Keats's writing, but more widely the poet's sense that the experience of traumatic historical change can beget a new kind of imaginative life. Hyperion's fall emblematizes this paradoxically generative condition, shaping both the content and form of the poem in such a way that the text comes to signify a major shift in literary history. Just as the titan's bodily suffering enables his status as an epic figure, the poem's drive toward narrative fragmentation not only performs but embraces epic poetry's historical outmoding. In both cases, the expectation of traumatic loss initiates an anticipatory imagining--Hyperion's, the poet's--that eschews recompense or consolation in Favor of an affective experience of that loss. Moving his poem toward rather than away from epic's demise, toward rather than away from the political and social circumstances that occasion that demise, Keats demonstrates that progressive historical narratives have become impossible in his contemporary moment. Yet this impossibility makes possible a new poetics--a lyric that emerges from epic's dissolution--and indeed a new mode of living amidst unrelenting political and social upheaval. Two decades of scholarship have presented us with a deeply political Keats, but one whose aesthetic engagements remain ascribable to the historical particularities of England's early-nineteenth-century political scene. Studies by Nicholas Roe and Jeffrey Cox have placed Keats squarely within the traditions of English political dissent and its Cockney variations. (1) In response to both the Harvard Keatsians' triumphal personalism and to early New Historicism's negative critique of Keats's poetics, this strain of inquiry necessarily deemphasized the ways in which Keats's aesthetic project remains committed to imagining a human life that by definition cannot be reduced to such contexts. (2) Arguing that Hyperion's highly figurative language counters without overcoming the representation of historical trauma commonly associated with the poem, I wish to reassert an approach to Keats's writing that explores how, for Keats, human identity emerges from the imagination's necessarily incomplete attempts to comprehend the fullness of its historical experience. With the term "historical," I refer not solely to the events and material circumstances surrounding a text's composition and circulation (the politicized publishing scene of Regency England, for example), but also to the narratives (poetic, scholarly, or otherwise) that attempt to make sense of those events and circumstances. Keats's poetry asks its readers to consider alternatives to the kind of imagining that produces historical narratives, even as it expresses a deeply felt response to actual events. By exploring this dimension of Keatsian writing, I mean not to align Keats with that model of willful ahistoricism we have called the Romantic Ideology, but rather to consider how his poem's marking of imagination's limits--and its related commitment to feeling--is itself an historically concerned endeavor. (3) Such a consideration may in turn help Keats scholars to reexamine the affective value of poetic form, focusing on how poetry represents feeling in particular historical moments and, more vitally, how it produces feeling readers.