The Time of Beauty
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Noel Jackson is Associate Professor of Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge, 2008) and other essays in Romantic literary culture. His essays have appeared in ELH, Modern Philology, MLQ, and elsewhere.
Footnotes
1. To George and Georgíana Keats, 29(?) December 1818, in The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 2:15. Hereafter cited in the text as LJK by volume and page.
2. Andrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. 139–57; Stanley Plumly, Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008).
3. Charles Cowden Clarke, “Recollections of Keats” (1861), in Keats: The Critical Heritage, ed. G. M. Matthews (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971), 399. The sentence is later altered to read, “His own line was the axiom of his moral existence, his civil creed,” in Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1878), 146. On Keats’s relationship to Clarke and the Dissenting community, see especially Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 8–10, 88110.
4. Endymion, 1:24, 31 in John Keats: Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 65. Subsequent quotations from Keats’s work are from this edition.
5. Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 243. Keats refers to “the Principle of Beauty” in letters to J. H. Reynolds, 9 April 1818 (LJK 1:266) and to Fanny Brawne, February 1820 (LJK 2:263).
6. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 102. In A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London & New York: Verso, 2002), Jameson describes the renewal of interest in beauty as one of the “regressions of the current age”—a step backward both from the modernist critique of classical aesthetics and from the dizzying imponderables of the postmodern sublime (3). Among materialist readers of Keats, Daniel P. Watkins comes closest to Jameson’s position in arguing that Keatsian beauty represents “a realm of subjective meaning that is apparently untouched by social exchange and social hardship.” See Keats’s Poetry and the Politics of the Imagination (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989), 38. For a far more nuanced account of how poetry of this period makes manifest “the ‘hurt’ of history,” see Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 126.
7. Ford, The Prefigurative Imagination of John Keats (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951); de Man, Introduction to The Selected Poetry of John Keats (New York: Signet, 1966), xi; Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 14.
8. These are the terms in which Jacques Rancière has described the “aesthetic regime of the arts” of which Schiller is the first and unsurpassed architect. See The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 29. Morris Dickstein’s essay for the original “Keats and Politics” forum of SiR characterizes the political aspirations of Keats and Shelley in similar terms: as he writes, the poets share “the goal of ultimate social renovation by way of the disinterested exertions of art.” See “Keats and Politics,” Studies in Romanticism 25, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 181. Subsequent references to individual essays in the “Keats and Politics” forum issue will be indicated by the abbreviation SiR.
9. Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 76.
10. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 71.
11. Bloch, “On the Present in Literature,” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge. MA: MIT Press, 1988), 207–23; Jameson, Postmodernism; or, the Cultural...
