Keats and Philosophy: The Life of Sensations

This book provides a reappraisal of John Keats, casting him as a figure of serious philosophical interest who warrants renewed attention in a contemporary age. With a literary-philosophical approach, Bari presents a fresh contribution to the fields of Romantic poetics and critical aesthetics, and demonstrates the productive ways in which literary theory might supplement literary criticism. Attending to a range of Keats's work, examining some lesser known sonnets alongside the epics Endymion and Hyperion, this study re-evaluates Keats's writing and challenges the prevailing critical understanding that previously cast him as a poet of unthinking sensuality. Instead, it argues that Keats produces profoundly intelligent verse that is acute in its emotional understanding, probing in its philosophical inquiries, and even prescient in its political analysis. Working from Keats's own accounts of feeling and thinking, the book draws out the connections between Romantic poetics and contemporary branches of continental philosophy that extend from Kant to Derrida. Bari takes Keats's poetic evocation of touching hands, beating hearts, and breathing bodies as a descriptive elaboration of experience, and considers how Keats's verse cultivates an idea of a life that is powerfully thought and felt. In this way, the study prompts readers to think through and beyond the poems to recognize the ways in which Keats urgently addresses our continuing preoccupations with matters of friendship, violence, and the environment.