Unspacing: The Architecture of Poetry in Shelley’s Alastor and Keats’s The Fall of Hyperion

Focusing on Alastor and The Fall of Hyperion, this article explores how catastrophic changes such as globalization are imprinted on poetry as a hidden figure, altering the very “space of literature” in the Romantic period. In contrast to William Wordsworth’s Prelude, which keeps city and country separate, nature in Alastor is traversed by ruined cities, disorienting the poem’s internal architecture, and making it difficult to bring the poem into focus generically or emotionally. In Sigmund Freud’s terms, some radical event has bypassed consciousness and gone inside, rendering consciousness superficial and the unconscious inaccessible. John Keats’s poem more consciously thematizes its own architecture to unground the existing conceptuality of poetry, initiating a more modern poetry that points forward to Gerard de Nerval, Arthur Rimbaud, and Charles Baudelaire.