Keats and Philosophy

<p>John Keats remains one of the most familiar and beloved of English poets but has received surprisingly little critical attention in recent years. This study is a fresh contribution to Keats criticism and Romantic scholarship positioning Keats as a figure of philosophical interest who warrants renewed attention. </p><p>Exploring Keats’s own Romantic accounts of feeling and thinking this study draws a connection between poetry and the phenomenological branches of modern philosophy. The study takes Keats’s poetic evocation of touching hands wandering feet beating hearts and breathing bodies as a descriptive elaboration of consciousness and a phenomenological account of experience. The philosophical terms of analysis adopted here challenge the orthodoxies of Keats scholarship traditionally characterised by the careful historicisation of a limited canon. The philosophical framework of analysis enhances the readings put forward while Keats’s poems in turn serve to give fuller expression of those ideas themselves. Using Keats as a particular case this book also demonstrates the ways in which theory and philosophy supplement literary scholarship.</p>