Porscha Fermanis
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748637805
- eISBN:
- 9780748652181
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748637805.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
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 ...
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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' 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' 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' 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. The book contributes to one of the most important current debates in literary scholarship — the understanding of the relationship between the Romantic period and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.Less
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' 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' 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' 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. The book contributes to one of the most important current debates in literary scholarship — the understanding of the relationship between the Romantic period and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.
Harold Fisch
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198184898
- eISBN:
- 9780191674372
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184898.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, Shakespeare Studies
This chapter argues that the manifest intention of Paradise Lost from the beginning and to its sequel in Paradise Regained is to relate the story of ‘Man’s First Disobedience’ as that which ‘brought ...
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This chapter argues that the manifest intention of Paradise Lost from the beginning and to its sequel in Paradise Regained is to relate the story of ‘Man’s First Disobedience’ as that which ‘brought Death into the World’, and which would only be set right by the redemptive sacrifice of ‘one greater Man’ who would make good the sin of Adam. Nevertheless, the other narrative which sees the story of Adam and Eve in its Old Testament context as something in between historical fable and moral exemplum is also present as a counterplot.Less
This chapter argues that the manifest intention of Paradise Lost from the beginning and to its sequel in Paradise Regained is to relate the story of ‘Man’s First Disobedience’ as that which ‘brought Death into the World’, and which would only be set right by the redemptive sacrifice of ‘one greater Man’ who would make good the sin of Adam. Nevertheless, the other narrative which sees the story of Adam and Eve in its Old Testament context as something in between historical fable and moral exemplum is also present as a counterplot.
Porscha Fermanis
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748637805
- eISBN:
- 9780748652181
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748637805.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter concentrates on Endymion and The Eve of St. Agnes. While William Hazlitt's comments do not explicitly refer to the historical elements of Walter Scott's and Godwin's novels, his ...
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This chapter concentrates on Endymion and The Eve of St. Agnes. While William Hazlitt's comments do not explicitly refer to the historical elements of Walter Scott's and Godwin's novels, his distinction between external and internal modes of observation has clear affinities with the way in which those writers themselves believed that history could be represented in fiction and in extra-historical genres such as biography and memoir. In both Endymion and The Eve, John Keats presents aspects of sentimentalist historiography — interiority, privatisation, historical evocation — within the framework of a staged sense of developmental progression. The inherently sociological orientation of Endymion and The Eve is made explicit in the Hyperion poems, which dramatise the encounter between the Titans and the Olympians as an anthropological clash between two different societal stages, although in both cases this narrative of human development is somewhat compromised by Keats' inability or disinclination to finish the poems.Less
This chapter concentrates on Endymion and The Eve of St. Agnes. While William Hazlitt's comments do not explicitly refer to the historical elements of Walter Scott's and Godwin's novels, his distinction between external and internal modes of observation has clear affinities with the way in which those writers themselves believed that history could be represented in fiction and in extra-historical genres such as biography and memoir. In both Endymion and The Eve, John Keats presents aspects of sentimentalist historiography — interiority, privatisation, historical evocation — within the framework of a staged sense of developmental progression. The inherently sociological orientation of Endymion and The Eve is made explicit in the Hyperion poems, which dramatise the encounter between the Titans and the Olympians as an anthropological clash between two different societal stages, although in both cases this narrative of human development is somewhat compromised by Keats' inability or disinclination to finish the poems.
Elizabeth Scott-Baumann
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199676521
- eISBN:
- 9780191755675
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199676521.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature, Poetry
This chapter shows that in the seventeenth-century elegy was alive to various formal re-workings. Poets since Ovid had used the elegy to write erotic love poetry, while it had also developed its ...
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This chapter shows that in the seventeenth-century elegy was alive to various formal re-workings. Poets since Ovid had used the elegy to write erotic love poetry, while it had also developed its modern sense of poetry written for the dead. Lucy Hutchinson's Elegies develops an unusual and original kind of elegy, fusing the form's erotic, mourning and political functions and creating poems which are intensely both political and personal. Using original manuscript evidence from Hutchinson's poems and commonplace book, this chapter reveals Hutchinson alluding to Virgil's Dido (in the translation of courtly poet Sidney Godolphin), alongside the more troubling model of female articulacy presented by Eve; both figures are evoked in the Elegies. It also shows how three of Hutchinson's poems on her Nottinghamshire estate, Owthorpe, are elegiac and dystopian country house poems, developing the genre as used by Ben Jonson and Aemilia Lanyer.Less
This chapter shows that in the seventeenth-century elegy was alive to various formal re-workings. Poets since Ovid had used the elegy to write erotic love poetry, while it had also developed its modern sense of poetry written for the dead. Lucy Hutchinson's Elegies develops an unusual and original kind of elegy, fusing the form's erotic, mourning and political functions and creating poems which are intensely both political and personal. Using original manuscript evidence from Hutchinson's poems and commonplace book, this chapter reveals Hutchinson alluding to Virgil's Dido (in the translation of courtly poet Sidney Godolphin), alongside the more troubling model of female articulacy presented by Eve; both figures are evoked in the Elegies. It also shows how three of Hutchinson's poems on her Nottinghamshire estate, Owthorpe, are elegiac and dystopian country house poems, developing the genre as used by Ben Jonson and Aemilia Lanyer.
