Bodily accommodations: Topography in the poetry of John Keats

The thesis examines Keats's descriptive poetry using recent developments in landscape aesthetics, and uses the socio-materialist critiques of recent Romantic theories to explain Keats's marginalized position in relation to the dominant aesthetic ideologies of his time. Keats's revisionary approach to landscape aesthetics is a result of his "aesthetic of engagement", an aesthetic which is opposed to the "aesthetic of detachment" propagated by eighteenth-century writers of topographical poetry. This aesthetic dialectic is described in the thesis, using the ecological theories of Jay Appleton, as a dialectic between prospect and refuge, where prospect represents the detached and picturesque view of the eighteenth-century "public" poet, and refuge represents the domesticated and sensual engagement with nature of the "private" poet. The Introduction presents this theory as it relates to Keats's letters, in which Keats's emphasis on the behaviours of ingestion, shelter-seeking, and sex align him with the private, domestic poetics of refuge, whose aesthetic depends upon biological satisfaction. This aesthetic is at odds with picturesque ideology, which demands poetic detachment and control--a poetics of prospect. The next three chapters analyze Keats's 1817 Poems, Endymion, and the two Hyperion poems using this dialectic of prospect and refuge, a dialectic which provides the impetus behind Keats's search for habitable aesthetic territory. Appleton's habitat theory is used to argue that Keats's landscape aesthetic is motivated by accommodation; in each poem Keats is seen attempting to fit himself to the environments he constructs, depending upon the extent of biological satisfaction to be gained. Chapter Five represents Keats's departure from this biological approach; using Marxist theory, I argue that the odes were written in a spirit of commodity-production, and that an engaged interaction with landscape disappears altogether, to be replaced by the picturesque aesthetic which Keats for so long resisted. The conclusion offers commentary on the different approach to space taken in the odes, where topography becomes iconography, and geographical space is reduced to the economic space of the literary market.