Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• MULROONEY, JONATHAN

Titel

How Keats Falls

Ist Teil von

• Studies in romanticism, 2011-07, Vol.50 (2), p.251-273

Ort / Verlag

Boston: The Graduate School, Boston University

Erscheinungsjahr

2011

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• 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 Hyperions 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. 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.