John Keats’s Odes and Masculinities

Abstract

Women, lovers, muses, dryads, goddesses and other feminised figures abound in the poetry of John Keats. The merging of the poetic T with a woman or the vanishing of the self into a Utopian space of feminine beauty are two of the most central themes of his early poetry as well as of his later odes. Hence, he has been described as a poet who was excessively fascinated by the idea of representing.”ecstatic or visionary experience as an erotic encounter with a female or feminized figure” (Wolfson: 1990, 325). Apart from representatives of New Criticism, there have probably been only few literary critics who have not commented on Keats’s poetry in gendered terms. Not only Keats’s contemporaries but also later generations have characterised him as ‘feminine’ or criticised him as ‘effeminate’; as if he was challenging or diverging from an apparently ‘masculine’ style of writing. Rarely have studies pointed out that a concept such as ‘manliness’ was already at Keats’s time a great issue that had to be heavily defended (an exceptional study is Fulford: 1999). Not only the non-literary world was occupied with fortifying the ‘true’ values of men but also the Romantic poets themselves have made ‘masculinity’ at times a core issue of their debates. There was, for example, a lengthy discussion among writers and poets whether or not the soul had a particular sex. In this controversy, most of the Romantics took a clear stand and concluded almost univocally that the soul had to be masculine. Even Coleridge who had become famous for his theory on androgyny stated: “Is it true what is so constantly affirmed, that there is no Sex in Souls? — I doubt it — I doubt it exceedingly” (quoted from Wolfson: 1998, 349).KeywordsEmphasis MineGender TermRomantic PoetLyrical PoetryEnglish PoetThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.