The Romantic Concealment of Desire: Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s Poetic Voices

The present study poses an interpretation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” and William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” so as to evince the subject of desire as the ulterior motif of these texts, even though the poetic voices of these works attempt to conceal such a theme. This reading interprets both poems as compositions that share the same thematic line as William Blake’s “The Book of Thel” and John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. Consequently, the close reading of the poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge will be presented.

Postmortem, Elegy, and Genius

This chapter turns to the medical field of pathology, sketching out a new theory of how discursive practices of medicine might be dependent on literary models by examining the history of the postmortem report in relation to the Romantic elegy. It explores a brief moment in the early nineteenth century when medical postmortem reports became widely available to the reading public. Using commemorative responses to the death of John Keats as the central example, but also reading the widely published postmortem reports of the deaths of Napoleon Bonaparte, Lord Byron, and Ludwig van Beethoven, which afforded readers an unexpected degree of closeness with the metaphorically charged bodies of the departed, the chapter focuses on how the postmortem report provides a protocol for interpreting mortality across a range of memorial genres in medical and literary fields. The postmortem report is shown to adopt certain generic qualities of earlier epitaphs, while later elegies by Percy Shelley and Alfred Tennyson continue to display the medical genre’s influence. The postmortem report is revealed to participate in a mutual exchange with literary conventions, as it first appropriates generic conventions from epitaphic literature, and then asserts a scientific protocol of taxonomical classification within humanistic discourse. When used in this commemorative field, reading bodily symptomology becomes a hermeneutics of consolation that brings its readers into intimacy with figures of genius.

Romantic Autopsy

Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading charts how medicine influenced the literature of British Romanticism in its themes, motifs, and—most fundamentally—forms. Drawing on new medical specialties at the turn of the nineteenth century along with canonical poems and novels, this book shows that both fields develop analogies that saw literary works as organic bodies and anatomical features as legible texts. Such analogies invited readers and doctors to produce a shared methodology of interpretation. The book’s most distinctive contribution is protocols of diagnosis: a set of practices for interpretation that could be used by doctors to diagnose disease, and by readers to understand fiction and poetry. In Romanticism, such interpretive protocols crossed between the emergent medical fields of anatomy, pathology, psychiatry, and semiology, and the most innovative literary texts, including the lyrics of William Wordsworth and John Keats, the elegies of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Alfred Tennyson, and the novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley. Romantic poems and novels were read through techniques designed for the analysis of disease, while autopsy reports and case histories employed stylistic features associated with poetry and fiction. Such practices counter the assumption of a growing specialization in Romanticism, while suggesting that symptomatic reading (treating a text’s superficial signs as evidence of deeper meaning), a practice still debated today, originated from medicine. Romantic Autopsy provides an original account of the life and afterlife of Romantic-era medicine and literature, offering an important new history underlying modern-day approaches to literary analysis.

Hermeneutic Dissection in the Lyric

This chapter charts developments in anatomy in the wake of the French Revolution, and shows how Romantic lyrics model a reading practice informed by anatomical medicine. Surgical tropes from the advances in morbid anatomy, for example, inform William Wordsworth’s most important poems. Referring to medical advances in battlefield dissection and autopsy that occurred during the French Revolution, Wordsworth turns from social analysis to self-critique as he performs his retrospective analyses of the “growth of the poet’s mind” and the “spots of time.” Responding to Wordsworth’s model of interpretation, the critic Francis Jeffrey and the poet John Keats developed a practice of dissective reading, an influential protocol that crossed between literature and medicine in the Romantic period. Dissective reading anticipates symptomatic close reading through a segmentation of surface and underlying structures, and invokes dismemberment as a tool for converting critical reading into authorial auto-exegesis. Examples drawn from Wordsworth and Keats reveal how Romantic lyrics offer up the poet’s own body as the subject of surgical (and critical) analysis, treating critical readings as diagnoses of the poets themselves.

Shelley’s Adonais and John Keats

Shelley’s elegy for Keats, Adonais, is set in the context of the acquaintance of the two poets, and in Shelley’s intellectual and poetic development up to 1821. His artistic decisions in determining the ornate ‘classical’ style of the poem, including the paratexts of its first published form, are understood as deliberately chosen to honour Keats, who had in Shelley’s understanding been killed by the effects of savage, politically motivated, attacks in the Tory Reviews. The essay then reveals the true extent and complexity of Shelley’s allusions to Keats’s poetry throughout Adonais, starting with its title as a Greek pun on ‘nightingale’, and covering references of many kinds to the whole range of Keats’s published output, including some of the most famous passages in Adonais.

Keats as a Reader

<p>This thesis examines the poetry of John Keats through an exploration of his attitude towards reading. Keats's reading is characterized by openness, receptivity, and crucially, response. The first chapter explores the dynamics of this by analyzing some early sonnets about his reading within the greater context of this thought as he lays it out in his letters. For Keats, the poetic process, which includes both reading and writing, is an organic one. The second chapter considers his mediated reading, looking first at the Chapman's Homer sonnet as a celebration of translation and the social reading experience. This leads into a greater exploration of Keats's friendships and sociability, which are not only fundamental to him, but which also play an important role in his reading and poetry. The chapter considers the dialogue that occurs within Keats's marginalia, with his friends, and with the books and authors he reads. This dialogue illustrates Keats's positive relationship with mediation and influence. The theatre in particular is a site of sociability and adaptation, and, for Keats it is also a platform for poetic voice. The third chapter expands on the importance of the aural experience of reading for Keats, primarily through an examination of "mistiness," a term Keats uses to describe a positive mediated reading experience in a letter to John Hamilton Reynolds. Keatsian mist is a state of mind which, while obscuring one sense -usually visual - amplifies the aural sense and imagination. The fourth chapter comprises an analysis of Keats's poetry of 1819 in order to explore questioning as a creative mode of reading, and silence as an ideal site for the growth of the creative imagination. "To Autumn" presents the culmination of Keats's reading in an affirmation of his own poetic voice.</p>

Keats as a Reader

<p>This thesis examines the poetry of John Keats through an exploration of his attitude towards reading. Keats's reading is characterized by openness, receptivity, and crucially, response. The first chapter explores the dynamics of this by analyzing some early sonnets about his reading within the greater context of this thought as he lays it out in his letters. For Keats, the poetic process, which includes both reading and writing, is an organic one. The second chapter considers his mediated reading, looking first at the Chapman's Homer sonnet as a celebration of translation and the social reading experience. This leads into a greater exploration of Keats's friendships and sociability, which are not only fundamental to him, but which also play an important role in his reading and poetry. The chapter considers the dialogue that occurs within Keats's marginalia, with his friends, and with the books and authors he reads. This dialogue illustrates Keats's positive relationship with mediation and influence. The theatre in particular is a site of sociability and adaptation, and, for Keats it is also a platform for poetic voice. The third chapter expands on the importance of the aural experience of reading for Keats, primarily through an examination of "mistiness," a term Keats uses to describe a positive mediated reading experience in a letter to John Hamilton Reynolds. Keatsian mist is a state of mind which, while obscuring one sense -usually visual - amplifies the aural sense and imagination. The fourth chapter comprises an analysis of Keats's poetry of 1819 in order to explore questioning as a creative mode of reading, and silence as an ideal site for the growth of the creative imagination. "To Autumn" presents the culmination of Keats's reading in an affirmation of his own poetic voice.</p>