Karen Swann
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780823284184
- eISBN:
- 9780823286157
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823284184.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Karen Swann
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780823284184
- eISBN:
- 9780823286157
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823284184.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
Biography has played an important role in the canonization of Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge. Each archive is saturated with stories of the life prematurely cut off or, in Coleridge’s case, of promise ...
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Biography has played an important role in the canonization of Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge. Each archive is saturated with stories of the life prematurely cut off or, in Coleridge’s case, of promise wasted in indolence; with reminiscences of contemporaries who describe subjects singularly unsuited to this world; and with stranger materials—death masks, bits of bone, locks of hair, a heart—preserved by circles and then sometimes circulating more widely, often in tandem with bits of the literary corpus. Especially when it centers on the early deaths of Keats and Shelley, biographical interest tends to be dismissed as a largely Victorian and sentimental phenomenon that we should by now have put behind us. And yet a line of verse by these poets can still, willy-nilly, trigger associations with biographical detail in a way that sparks pathos and produces intimations of prolepsis or fatality, even in readers suspicious of such effects. Biographical fascination—the untoward and involuntary clinging of attention to the biographical subject—is thus “posthumous” in Keats’s evocative sense of the term, its life equivocally sustained beyond its period. This book takes seriously the biographical fascination that has dogged the posthumous lives of the prematurely arrested figures of Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge. Arising in tandem with a sense of the threatened end of poetry’s allotted period, biographical fascination opens us to poetry’s modes of survival from the time of the romantic period, when it began to receive the first of its many death sentences, into our own present.Less
Biography has played an important role in the canonization of Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge. Each archive is saturated with stories of the life prematurely cut off or, in Coleridge’s case, of promise wasted in indolence; with reminiscences of contemporaries who describe subjects singularly unsuited to this world; and with stranger materials—death masks, bits of bone, locks of hair, a heart—preserved by circles and then sometimes circulating more widely, often in tandem with bits of the literary corpus. Especially when it centers on the early deaths of Keats and Shelley, biographical interest tends to be dismissed as a largely Victorian and sentimental phenomenon that we should by now have put behind us. And yet a line of verse by these poets can still, willy-nilly, trigger associations with biographical detail in a way that sparks pathos and produces intimations of prolepsis or fatality, even in readers suspicious of such effects. Biographical fascination—the untoward and involuntary clinging of attention to the biographical subject—is thus “posthumous” in Keats’s evocative sense of the term, its life equivocally sustained beyond its period. This book takes seriously the biographical fascination that has dogged the posthumous lives of the prematurely arrested figures of Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge. Arising in tandem with a sense of the threatened end of poetry’s allotted period, biographical fascination opens us to poetry’s modes of survival from the time of the romantic period, when it began to receive the first of its many death sentences, into our own present.
Toni Bentley
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300090390
- eISBN:
- 9780300127256
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300090390.003.0012
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This chapter considers the implications of Mata Hari's life and death. It suggests that her posthumous life as the ultimate femme fatale spy has not only been more glamorous than her real life ever ...
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This chapter considers the implications of Mata Hari's life and death. It suggests that her posthumous life as the ultimate femme fatale spy has not only been more glamorous than her real life ever was but far more useful to the public's imagination. While innocent of espionage, Mata Hari was guilty of the self-importance that had initially made her a noticed woman—and a condemned one.Less
This chapter considers the implications of Mata Hari's life and death. It suggests that her posthumous life as the ultimate femme fatale spy has not only been more glamorous than her real life ever was but far more useful to the public's imagination. While innocent of espionage, Mata Hari was guilty of the self-importance that had initially made her a noticed woman—and a condemned one.
