Keats, Ecocriticism, and the Poetics of Place

For several reasons, it would appear counterintuitive to think of John Keats as a poet of place. As Robert Kaufman points out, Keats is a poet of things: of artifacts that exist “to be energized, put into motion”—even be “disassembled or dissolved”—by subjects “who exist in relation” to them.¹ Timothy Morton likewise emphasizes Keats’s desire to create objects of such magnitude that they “reconfigure our very idea of what materials and matters could be.”² Christopher Rovee, in turn, characterizes Keats’s poetics in terms of the “museal.”³

The poetry of place, though, doesn’t traditionally take an interest in sites such as the museum. Rather, it probes the intersections of cultural expression and physical geography—concerned with representations that convey a sense of local specificity in contrast to the nature writing of literary convention.⁴ Keats, prone to express abstract thoughts in the language of physical sensation, generally makes it hard to pinpoint such instances of “concrete” experience,⁵ and though his poems contain innumerable natural objects and sceneries, such props have—for the most part—a very loose relation to the material reality outside of the poet’s mind. While this may be taken as a general characteristic of Romanticism, indeed, of poetic language as such, Keats distinguishes himself by so willingly trading the local for the universal.

The 1817 poem “Fancy,” drastic in its refusal to offer any pragmatic counterpoint to poetic transcendence, is a case in point. Since the joys of the world are always “spoilt by use” (10), Keats instead proposes that solace must be sought in the imagination. “Like three fit wines in a cup” (38), she brings together “All delights of summer weather; / All the buds and bells of May, / [---] / All the heaped autumn’s wealth” (31–35).⁶ With the aid of poesy, ephemeral nature can then be reinstated in its infinite form: adorned, since freed from cyclical determination, with the simultaneous sights and sounds of the seasons (39–66).

Such a poetics of excess—or heresy⁷—throughout the history of Keats’s reception the subject of disapproval, would also appear to disqualify him in terms of critical ecological reflection: most pressingly on account of his reluctance to accept the singular and contingent nature of human existence. In this regard, “green” scholars share with formalist critics an appreciation of the mature, chaste Keats; the author, that is, of “To Autumn”—perhaps the sole poem to have been discussed at any length in an ecocritical context.⁸ Studies of place and Romantic literature have on their part tended to ignore Keats almost completely,⁹ bringing the anecdote of “Keats’s place” to mind.¹⁰ According to his fellow students, that place was the window-seat in every room: a scene of yearning symbolic of a writing that appears to be grounded in place, only to the extent that it also faces the promise of a better elsewhere.

Against the background of these difficulties, I nonetheless want to consider the possibility of reading Keats as an ecological poet. Such an effort will point to an aspect of Keats’s work that is easily neglected, especially if one restricts the notion of ecological thinking to the realm of nature writing. Sianne Ngai’s analysis of the uneasy, or rather, too easy relation between poststructuralist language theory and the criticism of avant-garde poetry can in many ways be applied also to ecocriticism and eco-mimetic writing.¹¹ If such studies, then, tend to engage in works that explicitly thematize environmental materiality, revealing what Tom Bristow calls a number of “possible worlds as a counterpoint to our contemporary understanding of place,”¹² I will here be looking in the other direction—at the realm of imagination—in order to locate the material grounding of the poetic subject. In this regard, Keats’s work may reveal an unlikely field of ecological inquiry, actualizing with special pregnancy Martin Heidegger’s later work.¹³

Heidegger continues to hold an important position in ecocritical discourse, primarily on account of his imperative to “save the earth” in the...