Seeing Romantically in Lamia

As he matured beyond his formative, Huntian idiom, Keats’s discomfort with the romance began to surface in regular complaints about its “mawkish” and “smokeable” qualities. ¹ For Keats, the romance—escapist, sentimental, unworldly—embodied a feminine and apprentice aesthetic that he seemed to regard as a necessary rite of passage. ² Even in the itinerary outlined in the early “Sleep and Poetry,” Keats recognized that he “must pass them [romances] for a nobler life, / Where I may find the agonies, the strife / Of human hearts.” ³ But Keats continued to write romances late into his career, and commentators have tracked the development of more sophisticated and realistic romances less susceptible to charges of sentimentalism. Jack Stillinger has detected in the late romances a revisionary anti-romance sensibility that, in its attention to “The weariness, the fever, and the fret,” moved Keats beyond the popular romances of his contemporaries. ⁴ Isabella and The Eve of St. Agnes are Stillinger’s main exhibits, but Lamia features a sensitivity to the workings of romance that, rather than reductively opposing disenchantment to enchantment, foregrounds the mechanisms of romance—seeing, anticipating, and plotting—as they contribute to the very shaping of reality.

I. Seeing Reality

“All romance, literary and human,” writes Harold Bloom, “is founded upon enchantment.” ⁵ For Bloom, disenchantment—the apocalyptic emancipation of the creative imagination—requires both an engagement with revolutionary causes (social, literary, and political) and a purgatorial struggle against the dangers of selfhood. More important here than Bloom’s faith in visionary self-transcendence is his recognition that disenchantment must include intrasubjective as well as intersubjective stages. Almost all of the commentary on Lamia condemns enchantment, of course, but without appreciating that it is much more than a glorified daydreaming. Not surprisingly, romance is opposed to reality and imagination to reason. As John Barnard writes: “The poem is therefore about mutually exclusive categories of perception, and Lamia’s doomed attempt to cross their boundaries.”⁶ Stillinger writes that Lamia “serves well to introduce the basic Keatsian conflict between mundane reality and some extra-worldly ideal state.” ⁷ The very posing of this opposition seems to encourage the neat valorization of one pole over the other. Terence Allan Hoagwood’s promise of a dialectical reading of Lamia ends up offering a vulgar Marxist account of the material as determinant: “The relevant opposition is not between beautiful imagination (Lycius’s love) and cold reason (Apollonius); the relevant conflict obtains rather between material conditions and the delusions of idealism which mask them, thereby to entrap the deceived.” ⁸ Rather than rejecting the imagination/reason dichotomy, it is simply relocated to another level (material/ideal) that still performs much the same work. The critics’ findings seem almost predetermined by their approach: the leading romance/reality binary limits the available readings, compelling one to side with either Lamia as imagination or Apollonius as reason. Even those ironical readings (like Stillinger’s) sensitive to the appeal of both categories nonetheless continue to see these categories as distinct alternatives. ⁹ Donald H. Reiman details in Lamia the powerful human imperative to create gods, myths, and ideals, but in the end refrains from including Apollonius’s rationalism—which he aligns with the “reality-principle”—amongst “man’s mind-created gods.” ¹⁰

Writing on the status of the supernatural affections in Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge accords them only a nominal or derivative reality: “And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency.” ¹¹ But if enough people believe, if a critical mass is reached, the supernatural “thickens” into the real. If the supernatural spaces of romance (charmed circles, spirits of place, sacred bowers) are indeed inspired, it is by an agreement—which may involve little more than making disagreement uncomfortable—to ascribe causal efficacy to certain thoughts and acts. Magical incantations and spells are here no different from the more respectable modes of performative language (oaths, promises, vows); they work only before a receptive audience, an audience that has already authorized their reality. Pierre Bourdieu writes that “degrees are just as much...