Keats' Quest For Canonization In The Romantic Tradition Of Posthumous Writing

Keats, like Shakespeare, is a figure for the target of various studies. He never failed critics for multiple-oriented interpretations. Apart from the rather exhaustive biographical study of Keats, the question about Keats's being enshrined as a canonical poet and his unique development and accomplishment as a poet in so limited time and space has been still unresolved for centuries. Great importance is yet to be attached to the study of Keats's miraculous formation of canonization.This dissertation explores John Keats's quest for canonization or"to be among the English poets"with reference to the background of"the Romantic anxiety of audience"and"the posthumous life of writing"in the reading nation of the Romantic period. By investigating the history of positive influence and the concept of the burden of the past, the present author establishes a relation between Keats's anxieties and his unique way to accomplish canonization through close reading of the selected letters and poems. Taking the youngest of the currently canonical British poets and the shortest literary career on record into consideration, the dissertation lays claim to the poet's sharp awareness of his disadvantageous backgrounds and profound anxieties on the way to achieve canonization.Although many Romantics had to deal with the"peer pressure", pressure from their own contemporary circles, Keats, with so much mediocrity, had to fight with double pressures: peer pressure and precursor pressure. Pressure never goes without being shadowed by influence. The"canonical"is always the"intercanonical"because there is no hard and fast line can be drawn between the history of poetry and the influence of poetry. Those who exerted influence upon Keats have been multiple. And just as different poets can suggest different meanings to Keats, they speak differently to Keats: One can teach him to see, another to hear. They carry the weight of history or the weight of their own appetites. The dissertation only focuses on three Williams whose influences upon Keats, either in fragments or in memory, permanently put Keats in his unique introspecting composition state: William Shakespeare, Keats's ideal poet; William Hazlitt, Keats's adopted mentor, and William Wordsworth, Keats's contemporary leader. Traditionally, Keats greatly benefited from Romantic belief of the posthumous life of writing and was tremendously impressed by the Romantic anxiety of audience. Historically, Keats selected Shakespeare as the life-long presider who never ceased as an ideal poet until he became a canonical one. Contemporarily, Wordsworth overweighed all the other Romantic poets in setting an outstanding example for Keats to follow in an antithetical model of following rather than a parallel one and Keats indeed learned a lot from him in the formation of canonization. Theoretically, almost all Keats's critical opinions originated in Hazlitt's essays and the latter was Keats's poetic mentor. Very often, Keats looked to the influences from these precursors as the source of personal anxiety and regarded the agon with them as the major cause of self-canonization, holding the view that the way to be among the British poets largely depends on agon and self-rectification. For Keats, Shakespeare was not only his greatest literary model but his"good genius"guiding him in his own poetic enterprise throughout his writing career. That Keats bore striking similarity and owed specific indebtedness to Hazlitt was a commonplace to most romantic critics. Most Keats's theories about poetry, if not all, were developed from remarks of Hazlitt. Despite some disappointing events between Keats and Wordsworth and Keats's early tarnished image of Wordsworth, Keats's reading and studying this Romantic leader was both serious and beneficial. Clearly, Wordsworth remained an important influence on Keats's thought and art to the end of his career.Influence among poets is omnipresent but not omnipotent. Anxiety arising from influence plays different roles in different poets. It may cripple weaker talents but stimulate canonical genius. The anxiety of audience and the posthumous life of writing were two major concerns for most Romantics. The former was a romantic alternative for the anxiety of influence, and the latter arose from the impossibility of contemporary success and the understanding of posterity culture. But both were closely related to the formation of canonization. Keats's attitude towards the mass public was sometimes caught between the contradictory desire for fame and for a personal artistic integrity. But, fortunately, he could triumphantly adjust it in the urgent quest for canonization. Keats's affinity with audience was never formed one day. Their mutual-recognition began with conflict, preceded with compromise, and ended with understanding after a long disparity negotiation between the significance of audience and the canonization of the poet. Keats's shaking off negative influence and accomplishing of canonization in brief time partly resulted from the study of canons and the critical reading of the poetic giants, partly from his full awareness of the culture of posterity in the Reading Nation and a rational viewpoint toward composition.