'Physician to All Men': Keats and the Poet's Claim to Truth. (2nd January 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: MacGregor, Cora
• Is Part Of: Keats-Shelley review. Volume 34:Number 1(2020)
• Page Start: 56
• Page End: 61
• Publication Date: 2020-01-02
• Subjects: Empiricism -- medicine -- science -- truth -- language; English poetry -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Romanticism -- England -- Periodicals; Periodicals; Periodicals; 821.709
• DOI: 10.1080/09524142.2020.1761127
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0952-4142

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This essay contends that the canonical account of the influence Keats's medical training had on his poetic activity is lacking, since it fails to consider how empiricism, as a central tenet of early nineteenth-century scientific and medical discourses, informed Keats's theoretical understanding of poetry. I posit that Keats regarded both poetic material and the mental faculties deployed in the creation of poetry as somatically embodied and that through this the representational quality of the poetic medium, language, is elided. This conception explains Keats's divergence from the poetic philosophy of his contemporaries and his refusal to accept their subordination of art, conceived of merely as the facilitator of a political or moral end.