Metaphors of fever in the poetry of John Keats: A cognitive approach

Abstract

There is a long tradition among Keats’s critics that links his medical profession to his poetic career, claiming that the former has influenced the latter. Some of them argue that the poet’s medical learning influenced his thought and formed a source material for his poetry. This paper continues this tradition. I argue that Keats’s knowledge of medicine has provided him with technical information to describe abstract states such as negative mood and mental states through medical language. I examine some of his medical metaphors using a cognitive approach to investigate how Keats employs medical terminology to conceptualize these negative mental states. This new approach allows me to see how concepts and structures which belong to the domain of the medical profession (source) are mapped onto the domain of negative mental states and emotions (target) through the process of cross-domain mapping. Cross-domain mapping allows the speaker to use prior knowledge of the source domain and apply it to the target domain so as to describe it in a new way. Using this cognitive approach offers a better understanding of Keats’s poetry, particularly the metaphors of negative mental states such as depression and melancholy. My analysis differs from previous studies as my approach considers Keats’s medical profession as a domain where he maps concepts and frames onto the domain of negative emotions.

Keywords

• negative mental state
• cross-domain mapping
• cognitive approach
• stylistics
• fever
• medical language