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Endymion and the Physiology of Passion

Hrileena Ghosh

in John Keats' Medical Notebook: Text, Context, and Poems

This chapter focuses on Endymion, the only long poem Keats ever completed, which was written immediately after he left Guy’s Hospital when his medical experience was fresh in his mind. Reading ... More

This chapter focuses on Endymion, the only long poem Keats ever completed, which was written immediately after he left Guy’s Hospital when his medical experience was fresh in his mind. Reading Endymion through the contents of Keats’ medical Notebook allows a fresh perspective on the physiology that underlies and informs the poem’s depictions of passion. Close reading of the poem, and of the biographical circumstances in which it was composed, reveal the extent to which Keats’ medical experience affected his poetic creativity, and the way contemporary criticismrecognised and responded to this aspect of the poem. The chapter concludes with an exploration of Keats’ knowledge of Romantic medical ethics, and how this informed his delineation of the figures of healers. Endymion showcases Keats’ ability to convey extreme emotion through anatomical descriptions and medical vocabulary.Less

‘A Petty World of Myself’: Intimacy and Erotic Distance in Endymion

Gillian Knoll

in Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare: Metaphor, Cognition and Eros

Chapter 3 analyses Lyly’s Endymion, whose eponymous hero forges an erotic connection with the moon across the vast expanse of the night sky. Endymion’s investment in Cynthia’s strangest and most ... More

Chapter 3 analyses Lyly’s Endymion, whose eponymous hero forges an erotic connection with the moon across the vast expanse of the night sky. Endymion’s investment in Cynthia’s strangest and most distant incarnation grants him access to a form of intimacy that emerges from erotic distance. To theorize the attachment one can form with a majestic, vast, present-but-distant love object such as Cynthia, this chapter turns to Gaston Bachelard’s work on “intimate immensity,” a special mode of daydreaming in which the dreamer forms a powerful bond with an immense, mysterious, often cosmic, object of contemplation. Although such a relation requires a vast distance between the dreamer and the immense phenomenon he contemplates, Endymion’s metaphors of permeability activate a shared, mutual, and profoundly intimate erotic relation with Cynthia.Less

Civil Society: Sentimental History and Enlightenment Socialisation in Endymion and The Eve of St. Agnes

Porscha Fermanis

in John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment

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 ... More

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

The queer horizontal repertoire: Andy Warhol and Jack Smith lie down

Paisid Aramphongphan

in Horizontal Together: Art, Dance, and Queer Embodiment in 1960S New York

This chapter moves from the analysis of artists’ bodies to the bodies in their work. The languid, horizontal male body in the work of Warhol and other lesser-known figures in his milieu takes center ... More

This chapter moves from the analysis of artists’ bodies to the bodies in their work. The languid, horizontal male body in the work of Warhol and other lesser-known figures in his milieu takes center stage, including in underground film and theater. Through a close reading of Warhol’s film Couch (1964) and Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963), the chapter theorizes the political and cultural significance of the queer horizontal. The term encapsulates the critical potency of horizontal bodies against and within the modern regime of upright, productive verticality prevalent in all aspects of art and life. A second meaning of horizontality the chapter proposes has to do with its historiographical intervention: through formal analysis, the chapter draws a new, synchronic line through 1960s art to connect between different mediums and artistic conversations, with the logic of the drooping horizontal as a connecting thread. The chapter expands the notion of the queer horizontal to include the proto-feminist work of well-known figures such as Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, and Lynda Benglis, as well as the work of more “mainstream” artists such as John Chamberlain. The chapter ends with a consideration of contemporary Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura, who inserts his body into the heteronormative and racialized visual economy of Manet’s Olympia.Less

Endymion: The Text of Undersong

Simon Jarvis

in Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism

Jarvis explores, or more precisely, “tumbles into” the “deep thicket of new verse rhythms, textures, sentences, techniques” of a “masterpiece” of “simultaneous archaism and innovation.” As a “slap in ... More

Jarvis explores, or more precisely, “tumbles into” the “deep thicket of new verse rhythms, textures, sentences, techniques” of a “masterpiece” of “simultaneous archaism and innovation.” As a “slap in the face” of contemporary “public taste,” Keats announces with Endymion a “poetics [that] remains to be written.” Indeed, the craft of the poem might be a measure of its contemporaneity in that it opens onto possibilities of the “now” that are not reducible to its historical values.Less

Tracing Keats

Karen Swann

in Lives of the Dead Poets: Keats, Shelley, Coleridge

Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s account of the shock effect that is central to modern experience, this chapter argues that the materials of Keat’s posthumous life, circulating with his poetry, produce ... More

Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s account of the shock effect that is central to modern experience, this chapter argues that the materials of Keat’s posthumous life, circulating with his poetry, produce the conditions for biographical fascination, which arises when poetic figures come unpredictably to revive biographical materials as an unassimilable burden of reference. Turning to Keats’s own figurations of the poet in Endymion and The Fall of Hyperion, the chapter proposes that Keats’s poet-figures dramatize what Samuel Weber, following Benjamin, calls “the singular leave-taking of the singular” that is the very condition of modern experience. The modernity of Keats’s poetry involves this signaling and remembrance of lost singularity, an effect that detonates again in the reader’s relation to the biographical figure of Keats.Less

‘Slippery Steps of the Temple of Fame’: Cornwall and Keats's Reputation

in Bright Stars: John Keats, Barry Cornwall and Romantic Literary Culture

This chapter examines the efforts of Bryan Cornwall to redeem the reputation of John Keats, his more talented but commercially unsuccessful rival. It explains that after an unfavorable critical ... More

This chapter examines the efforts of Bryan Cornwall to redeem the reputation of John Keats, his more talented but commercially unsuccessful rival. It explains that after an unfavorable critical review of Keats' Lamia and Endymion, he sent two letters to the editor of the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany in defence of Keats' works. It provides evidence that those letters were written by Cornwall and not by Keats' close friend John Hamilton Reynolds. This chapter also considers the thorny issue of rivalry between Keats and Cornwall and the equally contentious issue of mutual influence.Less

Keats’s Catullan Samphire

Henry Stead

in A Cockney Catullus: The Reception of Catullus in Romantic Britain, 1795–1821

Chapter 5 concerns John Keats’s reception of Catullus. It poses relatively straightforward questions: could Keats have read Catullus, and did Keats read Catullus? Images and ideas associated with ... More

Chapter 5 concerns John Keats’s reception of Catullus. It poses relatively straightforward questions: could Keats have read Catullus, and did Keats read Catullus? Images and ideas associated with Catullus were an essential part of Keats’s countercultural classical style. Through the accumulation of allusion with Catullus it becomes clear that for Keats Catullus was one of the most important literary influences from the classical world. A Keats with a new cultural confidence emerges through discussion of ‘Sleep and Poetry’, ‘Endymion’, and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’.Less