John Keats And The Ideas Of The Enlightenment

John Keats is generally considered to be the least intellectually sophisticated of all the major Romantic poets, but he was a more serious thinker than either his contemporaries or later scholars have acknowledged. This book provides a major reassessment of Keats's intellectual life by considering his engagement with a formidable body of eighteenth-century thought from the work of Voltaire, Robertson, and Gibbon to Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith.The book re-examines some of Keats's most important poems, including The Eve of St Agnes, Hyperion, Lamia, and Ode to Psyche, in the light of a range of Enlightenment ideas and contexts from literary history and cultural progress to anthropology, political economy, and moral philosophy. By demonstrating that the language and ideas of the Enlightenment played a key role in establishing his poetic agenda, Keats's poetry is shown to be less the expression of an intuitive young genius than the product of the cultural and intellectual contexts of his time.

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, University of Augsburg (Englische Literaturwissenschaft), course: John Keats, 20 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: “Negative Capability” is a concept coined by the Romantic poet John Keats, as put down in a letter his brothers1, discussed and interpreted by scholars over and over again. On one hand it provides a desirable quality every poet should be in possession of, on the other hand it is to hold the almost presumptuous ability to solve - alongside imagination- the huge epistemological challenges of subject- object- relation and the constitution of reality. Even though Keats himself didn’t write any explicit work on his literary theory or poetical concept, his approach to poetry and its aesthetic function can be traced back in his poems and letters. There he openly addresses his attitudes as they are also expressed, sometimes between the lines, throughout his poetry. Only it seems that Keats changed his notions and ideas at times, some of his convictions can rather be seen as temporary spots of light in the ongoing process of the pursuit of knowledge than a real enlightenment. This actually mirrors Keats’s statement s about the acquisition of knowledge in a very precise way; that this whole task was enveloped in fuzz and uncertainty, where truth appeared in sparks of epiphany but could never be considered full and complete, absolute knowledge. It is thus enclosed in a developing process that leads ever higher and forwards to a state of further and deeper understanding. In this paper I am going to approach Keats’s ways and convictions in the search for knowledge and will take up the challenge of placing him in regard to his epistemology and closely related aesthetic theory. First of all I am going to work out in how far Keats can be understood as an heir of his time. How was he to understand and write about a world that had just been shaken by hopes and disappointments of the French Revolution that brought about a whole new concept of liberty, rights of the individual and anti- dogmatism? I will also show how his scepticism is a direct reaction to and consequent continuation of Enlightenment that worshipped the idealized intellect and reason. When considering the socio- cultural context in which Keats grew up, I hold it important to touch upon the philosophical theories of his time; mainly German Idealism had a great impact of thought in theses decades, whether Keats had read them (which can be doubted2) and had been conscious of their influence or not.

At the heart of this 'Literary Life' are fresh interpretations of Keats's most loved poems, alongside other neglected but rich poems. The readings are placed in the context of his letters to family and friends, his medical training, radical politics of the time, his love for Fanny Brawne, his coterie of literary figures and his tragic early death.

This book considers Keats’s major poems as exercises in Romantic historicism. The poetry’s rich allusiveness represents Keats’s effort to reclaim the British canon for Cockney revisionism, and reveals Keats characteristically invoking the past to define his contemporary cultural politics. The book begins by discussing Keats’s Cockney traditionalism in its Regency context and then proceeds through the poet’s career in chronological order. There are chapters on history and vocation in the poet’s first volume, the failed idealism of 'Endymion', gender and audience in the Medieval Romances, the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' in historical context, secularism and consolation in the other great Odes, and then the two 'Hyperion' fragments, in which history ramifies beyond poetic method to become the explicit subject of inquiry. The result is a stimulating reassessment of Keats’s intellectual development and most admired poems.

Psychologically and philosophically oriented, this work concentrates on the minor poetry of Keats and how that poetry serves as an enlightenment to the artist's multifaceted mind and spirit.

Keats and Scepticism explores Keats’s affinity with the philosophical tradition of scepticism and reads Keats’s poetry anew in the light of this affinity. It suggests Keats’s links with the origin of scepticism in ancient Greece as recorded in Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Scepticism. It also discusses Keats’s connections with Montaigne, the most important Renaissance inheritor of Pyrrhonian scepticism; Voltaire, the Enlightenment philosophe whose sceptical ideas made an indelible impact on Keats; and Hume, the most thoroughgoing sceptic after antiquity. Other than Keats’s affinitive ideas with these sceptical thinkers, this book is particularly interested in Keats’s experiments with the peculiar language, forms, modes, and genres of poetry to convey the non-dogmatic philosophy. In this light, it re-reads Isabella, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, the 1819 odes, the two Hyperions, King Stephen, and Lamia, all of which reveal Keats’s self-reflexive and radical sceptical poetics in challenging poetic dogmas and conventions. This book is for Keats lovers, students, teachers, scholars, or non-academic readers who are interested in Romanticism, nineteenth-century studies, or poetry and philosophy in general. This original, accessible interdisciplinary study aims to offer the reader a fresh perspective to read Keats and appreciate the quintessential Keatsian poetics.

Brimming with the fascinating eccentricities of a complex andconfusing movement whose influences continue to resonate deeply,30 Great Myths About the Romantics adds great clarity towhat we know – or think we know – about one ofthe most important periods in literary history. Explores the various misconceptions commonly associated withRomanticism, offering provocative insights that correct and clarifyseveral of the commonly-held myths about the key figures of thisera Corrects some of the biases and beliefs about the Romanticsthat have crept into the 21st-century zeitgeist – for examplethat they were a bunch of drug-addled atheists who believed in freelove; that Blake was a madman; and that Wordsworth slept with hissister Celebrates several of the mythic objects, characters, and ideasthat have passed down from the Romantics into contemporary culture– from Blake’s Jerusalem and Keats’sOde on a Grecian Urn to the literary genre of thevampire Engagingly written to provide readers with a fun yet scholarlyintroduction to Romanticism and key writers of the period, applyingthe most up-to-date scholarship to the series of myths thatcontinue to shape our appreciation of their work