How Keats Falls
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- How Keats Falls
Jonathan Mulrooney is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at the College of the Holy Cross. His essays on Romanticism, theatre, and other topics have appeared in numerous venues, including Studies in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, Studies in the Novel, and The Cambridge Companion to Theatre, 17301830. He is currently completing one book-length study, entitled Romanticism and Theatrical Experience, and beginning another, entitled Keats’s Vanishing Figures.
Footnotes
This essay is dedicated to the memory of my friend, Paul Poth (1969–2009). My thanks to Miranda Burgess, Eric Lindstrom, Todd McGowan, Valerie Rohy, and to the Holy Cross Faculty Colloquium for helpful responses to earlier versions of my argument.
1. Roe, John; Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
2. For representative studies of Keats that emphasize the poet’s heroic personalism, see Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963); and Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983). For foundational New Historicist accounts of Keats, see Jerome McCann, “Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism,” MLN 94, no. 5 (1979): 988–1032; and Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).
3. The classic formulation of the “Romantic Ideology” can of course be found in Jerome J. McCann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
4. Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 11 (emphasis in original).
5. de Man, “Introduction to the Poetry of John Keats,” in Critical Writings, 1953–1978, ed. Lindsay Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 181. For Cathy Caruth, de Man’s emphasis on falling, and on the problem of “how to refer to falling,” marks a resistance to the abstractions by which transcendental philosophy achieves systematic thought. See Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 76.
6. de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 16.
7. Andrew Bennett, in Keats, Narrative, and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) argues that in Hyperion rhetorical transition “is constituted by disjunction, resulting in a narrative form which seems to reflect the picture of the fallen Titans as broken statues strewn around the poem” (154). Bennett sees this emphasis on “faulture” as the structuring principle of The Fall’s, narrative recuperations (151–58).
8. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 102.
9. Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 188.
10. For the phrase “life of sensations,” see John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1:185. References to Keats’s letters subsequently cited in the text with the abbreviation LJK, followed by volume and page number.
11. Goodman focuses principally on the ways in which Georgic forms attend to such “noise.” See Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3–4.
12. With this contention I revise James Chandler’s conception of Keats’s poetry—”To Autumn” most vividly—as offering a post-Christian consolation. See his England in 1819 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 431. For a discussion of the ways in which lack of consolation gives way in Romanticism to “the productive melancholia of poets” (17), see Guinn Batten, The Orphaned Imagination: Melancholy and Commodity Culture in English Romanticism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).
13. Pfau, for example, insists that “At the heart of Keats’s poetry… lies the insight that afflicts Saturn at the opening of Keats’s Hyperion—albeit an insight that pays no future dividends and is not generative of any future action” (Romantic Moods, 317).
14. All references to Keats’s poetry are to John Keats: Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Belknap...
