Memory in Mankind: Keats's Historical Imagination

Abstract

Historical allusions and the theme of history add a psychological and philosophical dimension to Keats's poetry that reflects the change in historical thought during the romantic period. Keats's wide-ranging familiarity with history manifests itself in a development that begins in juvenile hero worship but rapidly matures into a subtle historical vision in the odes and Hyperion poems. His sense of history as a kind of collective memory makes possible a union of poetry and history, since he sees both as products of the imagination that portray the varied particulars of experience. History plays a major part in Keats's deepening acceptance of mortality and an accompanying affirmation of time and process through release from the fear of death. The relative success and failure of his attempts to unite history and poetry confirm his organic analogy: when he relies most on his own imagination and memory, he evokes a more vital sense of the past than when he follows sources rather mechanically. He did not live to effect the revolution in historical drama to which he aspired, but history as a concept within his lyric and narrative poems remains a compelling witness of his powers as historical poet.