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11 - Coleridge and Science
- Edited by Tim Fulford, De Montfort University, Bedford
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- Book:
- The New Cambridge Companion to Coleridge
- Published online:
- 13 November 2022
- Print publication:
- 24 November 2022, pp 161-177
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Summary
This new collection enables students and general readers to appreciate Coleridge’s renewed relevance 250 years after his birth. An indispensable guide to his writing for twenty-first-century readers, it contains new perspectives that reframe his work in relation to slavery, race, war, post-traumatic stress disorder and ecological crisis. Through detailed engagement with Coleridge’s pioneering poetry, the reader is invited to explore fundamental questions on themes ranging from nature and trauma to gender and sexuality. Essays by leading Coleridge scholars analyse and render accessible his extraordinarily innovative thinking about dreams, psychoanalysis, genius and symbolism. Coleridge is often a direct and gripping writer, yet he is also elusive and diverse. This Companion’s great achievement is to offer a one-volume entry point into his incomparably rich and varied world.
6 - Knowledge's ‘gordian shape’: Keats and the Disciplines
- Edited by Brian Rejack, Illinois State University, Michael Theune, Illinois Wesleyan University
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- Book:
- Keats's Negative Capability
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 08 July 2020
- Print publication:
- 18 January 2019, pp 93-107
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Summary
Disciplinarity was unkind to John Keats, and the review was its bludgeon. The literary field, elite reviewers, and other poets famously responded to the incursions of an ‘uneducated and flimsy stripling’ into their midst by attacking his medical training and education. His previous professional commitments, unrefined by medical celebrity and ungilded by a reputation for scientific genius, encouraged critics rhetorically to undermine his poetic legitimacy. Attacking Keats's education, John Gibson Lockhart (under the pseudonym ‘Z’) wrote disparagingly that both Keats and Leigh Hunt ‘write about Apollo, Pan, Nymphs, Muses, and Mysteries, as might be expected from persons of their education’ (Z, p. 275). Nicholas Roe argues that these reviews waged a proxy war in the literary press against the politically threatening models of dissenting education embodied in Keats's Enfield School: ‘it was Keats's unusual educational background, above all, which served as a focus for [Lockhart’s] animosity’. Lockhart dismissed Keats to the apothecary's toiling anonymity: ‘It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to ‘plasters, pills, and ointment boxes’, &c’. (Z, p. 276). This is a disciplinary dismissal; even if Lockhart subtextually disregards Keats on the basis of the young poet's radical politics, he explicitly claims that Keats's problem is that he lacks the right sort of expertise.
Keats responded by redoubling his commitment to maintaining porous boundaries between medical and poetic practice. Critics have spoken voluminously about how Keats's medical training emerges in his poetry. His characterization of the poet as ‘A humanist, physician to all men’ in The Fall of Hyperion fuses his two professional pursuits (Canto I: line 190). Indeed, as Roe maintains, Keats's responses to the critical drubbing of Endymion indicate that he considered his apothecary training and his poetry as intertwined (pp. 168–9). For instance, in an 1819 letter to his brother, Keats wrote, ‘I have been at different times turning it in my head whether I should go to Edinburgh & study for a physician’, going on to suggest that should he fail in that role it would not be because of an incapacity for the work but because of a distaste for the need to charge fees as a healer (LJK, II: p. 70).