Résumés
Abstract
When Wordsworth and Coleridge occupy scanty plots and lime-tree bowers, they do so briefly and out of necessity, but Keats consistently describes islands, burrows, bedrooms, and pavilions dense with leafy and/or commercial luxury. More important, he posits such spaces as models for good verse, which, he contends, should feel “like a little copse.” To describe Keats’s regard for packed luxury (that is, circumscribed sensory excess), I choose the term luscious, a word whose etymological links to lush, plush, delicious, lascivious, and, of course, luxurious, render it uniquely suited to an aesthetic defined, paradoxically, by great (sensory) wealth in little space. The following essay argues that this un-Wordsworthian turn to crowded interiors represents not only a Keatsian thematic preoccupation but also, perhaps counterintuitively, Keats’s most significant formal legacy. Keats’s early connection to Leigh Hunt affiliates him with the luxury-loving bourgeoisie. However, less interested in domestic spaces than poetic ones, Keats rediscovered and redefined the catalogue, or poetic list, in an effort to translate gracious living into luscious verse.
Parties annexes
Works Cited
- Adburgham, Alison. Shops and Shopping, 1800-1914: Where, and in What Manner the Well-Dressed Englishwoman Bought Her Clothes. London: Barrie, 1989.
- Bate, W. Jackson. John Keats. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1963.
- Berg, Maxine. “New Commodities, Luxuries and their Consumers in Eighteenth-Century England.” Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650-1850. Ed. Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999.
- Cuddon, J.A. “Parataxis.” The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 4th ed. London: Blackwell, 1999.
- Curran, Stuart. “Romantic Poetry: Why and Wherefore?” The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism. Ed. Stuart Curran. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.
- Finney, Gail. The Counterfeit Idyll: The Garden Ideal and Social Reality in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Germany: Niemeyer, 1984.
- Hunt, Leigh. Selected Essays. London: Dent and Sons Ltd, 1929.
- Keats, John. The Complete Poems. Ed. John Barnard. 3rd ed. London: Penguin, 1988.
- ———. The Letters of John Keats. Ed. Hyder Edward Rollins. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1958.
- Kruger, Kathryn. Weaving the Word: The Metaphorics of Weaving and Female Textual Production. London: Associated U Presses, 2001.
- McGann, Jerome. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.
- Mizukoshi, Ayumi. Keats, Hunt and the Aesthetics of Pleasure. Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2001.
- Motion, Andrew. Keats. New York: Farrar, 1998.
- Nenadic, Stana. “Romanticism and the Urge to Consume in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century.” Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650-1850. Ed. Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999.
- Nemoianu, Virgil. The Taming of Romanticism: European Literature and the Age of Biedermeier. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.
- Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1988.
- Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968.
- Sperry, Stuart. Keats the Poet. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973.
- Stillinger, Jack. “The Hoodwinking of Madeline: Skepticism in The Eve of St. Agnes.” The Hoodwinking of Madeline, and Other Essays on Keats’s Poems. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1971.
- Walvin, James. Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660-1800. London: Macmillan, 1997.
- Wolfson, Susan J. The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986.
- Wu, Duncan, ed. Romanticism: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.