Love at last sight: Figures of apprehension in Keats and Becquer (Spain, John Keats)

This dissertation interprets the function of the figure of hypotyposis in selected romances and lyrics of John Keats (1795--1821) and Gustavo Adolfo Becquer (1836--1870). My focus on the figure of hypotyposis, which takes cues from rhetorical critics of Spanish and English romantic and post-romantic poetry, considers the way figure and not logic has been thought to write melancholy and sublimity. Consequently, I read hypotyposes not solely as projections of the poet's mind or as objects of the quest for personal illumination or self-knowledge, but also as tropes of the situation of the reader's act of apprehension.; Exploring "romantic" texts in part through neoclassical rhetoric seems justified historically and philosophically, especially as current critical evaluations often convert the aspectual paradoxes of imaginative writing into a fixed mirror of the poet's sociopolitical stance. My approach to the lyrics and romances that I have chosen hopes to have remained sensitive to the waywardness of the literature. A reading that considers Keats's and Becquer's direct or indirect rhetorical education in persuasive oratory, of which making listeners see the "truth" is a major aim, may shed some light on the contradictions that critics have noted regarding, for example, the poets' religious and social engagement. According to the ancient rhetoricians, the goal of hypotyposis is to persuade the audience of the legitimacy of a situation through vivid description. The ideal of a humanistic, rhetorical education for Hugh Blair, in Britain, and proponents of his work such as Alberto Lista, in Spain, was also to produce virtuous agents and critical readers.