Keats's Orientalism

Abstract

EDWARD SAID ARGUES IN CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM THAT IDEAS SUGgesting, often ideologically implementing, imperial rule dominate nineteenth century European art and literature.(1) This orientalist narrative, though acknowledged, is not seen as dominating the poetry or informing the poetics of Keats, a lack of emphasis that may be due a later effect of earlier marginalization of a Keats. Jerome McGann has said, for instance, that the 1820 volume is a reactionary book in which Keats seeks dissolve social and political conflicts in the mediations of art and beauty an eye attracting the favorable attention of the public ... and allay conflict that had greeted earlier work.(2) In a similar way, Keats is marginalized in relation imperialism. Nigel Leask suggests Keats's limited presence in a political discourse of when he writes that politics and ideology have informed many current readings of the romantics, even Keats.(3) In Endymion, Leask writes, Keats's orientalism is primarily a question of style, imperial heraldry uncomplicated by the anxiety of empire (125). Developing a closer tie between Keats and a complicity imperialism, Debbie Lee views Keats as appropriating traces of African Voodoo and its social configurations in slave culture to celebrate the poetic imagination through the magic and mystery of Africa, thus exercising his colonial prerogative possess and dispossess that particular history.(4) But it might be argued that Keats's zombification, Lee's term for death-in-life type wakefulness (14), is echo of McGann's apolitical dead zone found in the silence of the Grecian Urn. Keats, in so far as he is seen as creator and consumer of such orientalist constructions, is thus viewed as distancing himself from or, at most, aestheticizing the realities of oppression and victimization. Keats is seen as subversive, poetic practices serve reinforce marginal status in relation the paternal forces structuring language: he subverts by displaying lack. Marjorie Levinson argues that Keats's use of popular works (or, were it a focus of her study, orientalist paraphernalia) consisting of travel books, dictionaries, illustrated encyclopedias and translations of classical works, signals vulgar or bad access the forces that shape and dominate society.(5) Because Keats is seen as a person whose experience, in Paul de Man's words, is mainly literary (quoted in McGann 440) or, in Levinson's terms, reflects a fetishistic disavowal of social impotence, thus providing insight into the mechanisms running that society, Keats's relation imperialism may suffer from over-determined readings which prevent the emergence of a Keatsian body and body of work that engages the shaping forces of political and imperial narratives. One characteristic that these critiques share is the juxtaposition of Keats's relationship political power and identity. A set of letters written in October 1818 interconnect references identity and politics, specifically the politics of imperialism and relationality otherness. Keats writes publisher, Hessey, that The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man;(6) later he writes publisher's lawyer, of the nature of the poetical Character itself ... the camelion Poet and the consequences of possessing such a character: When I am in a room People ... then not myself goes home myself ... but the identity of every one in the room begins press upon me that, I am in a very little time anhilated [sic].(7) It is thus in a sequence of letters publisher and publisher's lawyer, and after the reviews of Endymion, that Keats describes poet of no identity who, from this nullity, raises the names of saturn and Ops (To Woodhouse, Letters 1.387). He also writes George and Georgiana a few days before signaling the emergence of a multifaceted identity which is with Achilles shouting in the Trenches, or among the pastoral poets in Sicily, or throwing [his] whole being into Troilus,(8) thus juxtaposing these poetic capacities the impotence of the lower case saturn. …