Keats and The Chemistry of Poetic Creation

Abstract

Keats often imagines the poetic process (the way poetry is created or conceived) as a flight from reality to some dreamworld of imagination. At other times it seems an identification with and heightening of the concrete and actual. What mediates between these two apparently contradictory views of aesthetic experience are certain fundamental analogies borrowed from contemporary science, in particular chemistry, that underlie his whole view of the poetic imagination and its operation. Keats's favorite metaphors for poetic creation reveal how the imagination transmutes material phenomena or sensations into poetic or “essential” form in accordance with the principles of ethereal chemistry described by such a writer as Sir Humphry Davy and by a process remarkably akin to that of chemical distillation. The essential forms of poetry derive their reality both from the identity of material phenomena and the transforming power of the mind. Later, however, Keats's attitude toward this process undergoes a notable change. Thus the Hermes episode in Lamia can be read as a parody of his whole earlier sense of the poetic process and its authenticity. Keats's knowledge of and reliance on science becomes an integral part of the more ambivalent view of poetry that characterizes his later career.