Interior Space and Description in Keats's Narrative Poetry

Abstract

IntroductionIn Keats's narrative poetry, an acute awareness of the spaces that characters occupy and in which the action unfolds gives particular symbolic significance to various interior spaces (such castles and houses, living rooms, ballrooms, bedrooms, tombs, etc.) with windows and doors or no openings. In this article, I account for Keats's employment of the descriptive method with a specific focus on his creation of interior space. How does he craft these interior spaces? Which means are used to achieve which ends? How do they function within the narratives? are they mainly performed by or focalized through characters?To address these issues, I turn to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's book Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, published in 1766. Lessing theorizes what he deems the proper subjects for painting and poetry, respectively. Although he concludes that depicting in space belongs to painting whereas depicting a sequence of events falls under the domain of poetry, he investigates how poetry and painting can use each other's resources. In a similar vein, Georg Lukacs has theorized about literature's means of evoking space in his 1936 essay Narrate or Describe? Skeptical towards extensive descriptions mere fillers, Lukacs instead advocates that description should be thematically integrated in a central action.In dialogue with Lessing's and Lukacs's theories, I analyze Keats's use of description and interior space in his narrative poetry. I apply three ideas from Lessing to Keats: first of all, his notion of an economy of descriptive adjectives (functioning epithets); secondly, his notion of narrativized description; and finally, the notion that poetry literally organizes language spatially. In relation to the latter, I supplement Lessing with Brian McHale's notion that poetry spaces language, proposed in Unnaturalness of Poetry (2013). Though I argue that Keats's rendition of space is mainly aperspectival, I employ Lessing's three ideas to probe the way his description of interior space can have multiple functions: serving deliberate interruptions; being thematized, semanticized and narrativized; offering a poetic vision; and occasionally reflecting character psychology.The interpretation of Keats focuses on Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil (1818) and Eve of Agnes ( 1820). In I explore the image of the tomb and the spatial entities of the pot and the forest, which according to Keats's extended understanding of space function interior spaces (with the ability to contain living or dead people within them). In St. I focus on the symbolic significance of Madeline's chamber space for the scene of seduction, the climax of the story.Descriptive Stasis versus Plot ProgressionIn Sleep and Poetry (1817) Keats bids farewell to delightful poetry in order to write in an epic and more narrative mode, with these often-quoted lines: And can I ever bid these joys farewell? / Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life, / Where I may find the agonies, the strife / Of human hearts ( 122-125). Yet if we assess what Keats went on to write, the narrative poetry of his last volume of poetry Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of Agnes, and Other Poems ( 1820) does not really conform to these epic aspirations. For one thing, he continues to write lyric poetry (not least, the critically-acclaimed great odes) and, for another, he composes his narrative poems, which are lyric-narrative hybrids.Keats indulges in elaborate descriptions of various items in both his lyric and in his lyric-narrative poetry. Scholars have stressed how Keatsian narrators often present various figures as though they were art objects (Kelley 170). Keats's Fragment of Castle-Builder typifies his interest in description. The speaker in the poem indulges in imagining-or performatively inventing-a specific room in a castle. Theresa Kelley writes about how the title and the repeated use of the modal 'should' (26, 28, 59, 63, 65) recognize this room a rich poetic 'phantasy' (47), created out of thin air and that [tjhe features and appointments seem both substantial and yet patently invented (Kelley 175). …