John Keats and Some Versions of Materiality

Abstract

Materialist and historicist approaches to Keats have given us a Keats who thumbs his nose at conventional aesthetics, and the class assumptions buried within aesthetics. Christopher Ricks showed us how attuned Keats was to adolescent embarrassment, and how those nuances challenged an aesthetics that wanted nothing to do with embarrassment. Marjorie Levinson then demonstrated Keats’s efforts to parade his middle-classness with an ‘aggressively and absolutely superficial’ verbal materiality, one that ‘deconstructs humanistic seriousness altogether’. More recently, Christopher Rovee situates Keats within a contemporary debate about museums and waste that manifests ‘the predicament of art in capitalist modernity’, where wasting time is a luxury. Together, these approaches question the relation of surface to depth, while rereading Keats’s surfaces as forms of depth that question conventional depth even as they equate that depth to ideology. These versions of materiality also share an interest in materialist determinism: Keats’s social class matters for it shapes his ideology. The bases for such determinism are 1) the idea that materialism trumps idealism and 2) the idea that materialism trumps idealism because it conditions idealism and aesthetics. I seek instead a materialist possibility and a materialist aesthetics that embraces possibility, and in so doing, I am reminded of the Romantic desire to see into the life of things. The goal of this essay is to begin to reorient our accounts of Romantic materiality and aesthetics toward possibility, not determinism. I begin by thinking about how materialist determinism works in Romantic criticism. I then turn to Keats and Romantic theories of matter to suggest ways in which materiality need not be endorsed at the expense of ideality, especially since as W. J. T. Mitchell reminds us, ‘the concrete is (as Hegel points out) the most abstract concept we have’. I conclude by thinking about how theories of Romantic matter might reopen questions of the aesthetic so that it cannot be automatically subsumed by ideology.