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5 - John Keats and the sense of the future

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Noel Jackson
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Summary

“Alas!”

Said he, “will all this gush of feeling pass

Away in solitude? And must they wane,

Like melodies upon a sandy plain,

Without an echo? Then shall I be left

So sad, so melancholy, so bereft!

Yet still I feel immortal!”

John Keats, Endymion (JK, 2:680–6)

I will assay to reach to as high a summit in Poetry as the nerve bestowed upon me will suffer.

Keats to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818 (JKL, 1:387)

“No one can question the eminency, in Keats's poetry, of the quality of sensuousness.” John Keats's reputation as the most sensuous of British Romantic poets – next to Spenser, perhaps, England's most richly sensuous poet – has proved resilient in the years since Matthew Arnold made this pronouncement more than a century ago. My aim in the present chapter is to re-open the familiar case of Keats's “sensuousness.” In doing so, however, I wish to show how insistently Keats's writing complicates this characterization of his work. For while regularly identified with a sensuous poetic style, Keats often describes his poetry as being most closely associated not with the senses but rather with the faculty of abstraction. In a surprising number of instances, Keats's appeals to sensation remain just that: appeals self-consciously issued from the perspective of a deferred or denied sensuous immediacy.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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