John Keats in Sensing: Poetry, Perception, and Phenomenology

Abstract

This study elevates John Keats’s stylistic sensuousness to a significant and coherent strand of thought about embodied human existence. It offers a reappraisal of Keats’s sensuousness and demonstrates Keats to be a poet who can thoughtfully awaken his readers’ sense of embodied situatedness in the world. Keats in his poetry and poetics explores how embodied subjects meaningfully direct their consciousness to a sensible world in experience. In dialogue with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology in the twentieth century, this study advances the current research on the body in Romantic scholarship by broadening the scope of the discussion about embodiment. Each chapter pursues how Keats in his poetic experiments interrogates the relationship between sensuous experience and human understanding of existence, things, reality, alterity, language, and temporality. This interdisciplinary study thus illuminates Keats’s sensuous literary style as a productive way of philosophical thinking.