Keats and Philosophy

The Life of Sensations

Shahidha Kazi Bari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136344671
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Feeling
• 2 Breathing, Beating, Being
• 3 Becoming
• 4 Wondering
• 5 Surviving
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index