Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 The politics of Keats’s early poetry
- 2 Endymion’s beautiful dreamers
- 3 Keats and the “Cockney School”
- 4 Lamia, Isabella, and The Eve of St. Agnes
- 5 Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, and Keats’s epic ambitions
- 6 Keats and the ode
- 7 Late lyrics
- 8 Keats’s letters
- 9 Keats and language
- 10 Keats’s sources, Keats’s allusions
- 11 Keats and “ekphrasis”
- 12 Keats and English poetry
- 13 Byron reads Keats
- 14 Keats and the complexities of gender
- 15 Keats and Romantic science
- 16 The “story” of Keats
- 17 Bibliography and further reading
- Index
7 - Late lyrics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- 1 The politics of Keats’s early poetry
- 2 Endymion’s beautiful dreamers
- 3 Keats and the “Cockney School”
- 4 Lamia, Isabella, and The Eve of St. Agnes
- 5 Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, and Keats’s epic ambitions
- 6 Keats and the ode
- 7 Late lyrics
- 8 Keats’s letters
- 9 Keats and language
- 10 Keats’s sources, Keats’s allusions
- 11 Keats and “ekphrasis”
- 12 Keats and English poetry
- 13 Byron reads Keats
- 14 Keats and the complexities of gender
- 15 Keats and Romantic science
- 16 The “story” of Keats
- 17 Bibliography and further reading
- Index
Summary
When T. S. Eliot cited Ode to a Nightingale for the “impersonal” art that he esteemed over the Wordsworthian effect of “personality,” he was repeating Keats's own favoring of a “poetical Character” that, unlike “the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime,” presented “no self [. . .] no Identity” (KL 1.386-87). This value would become the New Critical standard of “objective” poetic form, for which Keats's Great Odes provided textbook models. It is thus remarkable to see this hallmark Keatsian effect so starkly subverted by poems he wrote after these odes, from late 1819 to early 1820: “The day is gone,” “I cry your mercy,” “What can I do?,” “Physician Nature, ” a revision of “Bright Star,” and an enigmatic fragment, “This living hand” - all inspired, or haunted, by Fanny Brawne. Desperately in love, despairing of success as a poet, struggling financially and in failing health, with no aim of publication, Keats still turned to poetic form to grapple with a passion, so he told her, that he knew had turned him “selfish,” that is, self-occupied (KL 2.123; 223).
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Keats , pp. 102 - 119Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001
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