Beyond Formalism: The Problem of Keatsian ‘Self’

Abstract

Keats seems only to sustain his poetic selfby way of negating and dismantling it in an impersonalised aesthetic form. His insistence that the poet has 'no self' seems the necessary condition of his poetics of 'Negative Capability'. The critics whose work secured the status that Keats's poetry now enjoys, in particular the New Critics of the mid-twentieth century, tended to read the poems in terms that Keats had himself proposed, celebrating poems such as 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', in which Keats might be shown to have achieved a self-contained formal beauty rarely to be found in the Romantic era.2 It was an approach that inevitably led critics either to ignore or to devalue all those other poems in which Keats seems to express rather than to negate his 'self'. One product of this critical approach has been that, in comparison with the large weight of critical attention that has been devoted to the great odes, the late lyrics have been neglected. Susan Wolfson is the critic who has done most to reawaken 'formal' interest in Keats's neglected late lyrics. She wishes to establish a place for these poems that evades at once the New Critical suspicion that in his last poems Keats lapses from the assured aesthetic mastery of his great odes and the tendency that she detects in Jerome McGann to subordinate 'formal and stylistic reading' to 'a general socio-historical methodology'3, and she does so by uncovering within the poems a dramatic conflict between Keats's love for Fanny Brawne, and his devotion to the Muse. Her analysis of the poems is designed to show how this conflict is 'registered in without being fully contained by poetic form' (p. 166). My own reading of the poems is indebted to Wolfson's, but the purpose of this essay is to argue that Wolfson oversimplifies the opposition between Keats's rival devotions to Fanny and to