What Poetry Can Do for the World: The Case of John Keatss The Fall of Hyperion and Lamia

Abstract

This essay attempts to explicate how John Keatss poetic practice embodies a sense of contradiction and instability in response to the historical conditions that distorted his original poetic ideals through a reading of The Fall of Hyperion and Lamia. Initially, Keats connection with Leigh Hunt and his circle invited him to the world where poets as liberal intellectuals fulfill the public good by their writing practice, but this connection caused Tory reviewers to identify Keats as a Cockney poet, signifying their strong contempt for him. This Cockney identity made a far-reaching impact on his literary career, since this identity stigmatized not only his poetic practice and political creeds but all the material conditions on which his personal life was based, and thus his original ideal of enlightening the public with his poetry came to be deflected by a growing sense of anxiety over the reading public. This unstable phase of Keatss life, indeed, represents the problematic material conditions of his contemporary poets in general. In the literary public sphere of the early nineteenth century, the act of posing questions open to uncertainties in The Fall of Hyperion and the aspiration to complete love or poetic beauty by enacting self-erasure in Lamia were the only realistic forms of communication that Keatss poetic practice could conceive of in the face of prevailing conservative politics and commercialized publishing markets. These works, in this sense, can be said to embody the historical limitations and challenges imposed on literary intellectuals at that time and the public sphere that had been formed by their poetic practices.