Poetics of Self and Form in Keats and Shelley: Nietzschean Subjectivity and Genre

In focusing on the poetic treatment of self and literary form in Keats and Shelley, Mark Sandy shows how using Nietzsche's philosophy to illuminate Keats's correspondence and Shelley's A Defence of Poetry provides a conceptual basis for a comparative reading of the poets. Using key ideas from Nietzsche, Sandy explores Keats's Endymion and Shelley's Alastor as redefinitions of the romance genre. Further, he suggests that in their redescription of romance, Keats and Shelley discovered a radical mode of subjectivity that is present in Keats's major odes and Shelley's lyrical poetry as a conflict among poetic identity, art, and existence. In Sandy's reading, Shelley's Adonais and Keats's The Eve of St Mark emerge as diverse meditations on crises of posthumous reputation and future audience, whereas Keats's Hyperion fragments and Shelley's The Triumph of Life resolve these anxieties over authorial posterity by entrusting the reader with a new form of poetical self.

Mark Sandy is Lecturer in English at the Department of English Studies, University of Durham, UK.