John Keats and the Sensevil Sublime

Abstract

This essay is divided into two sections. In the first, I argue the conditions for the Keatsean Sensevil Sublime, drawing upon adequate resources from political (Hobbesian) and aesthetic categories (Longinus, Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant) to showcase the expansions and limitations of this Sublimity. A close-reading of “This Living hand, now warm and capable” (Written approximately in December, 1819, published posthumously, 1898) will enhance the literariness of my argument. Gradual difference, and deference from the ‘sensible’, the most recognizable Romantic characteristic of Keatsean poetry, is observed when the agencies of comprehension, ideological subjectiveness and moral superiority are conflated with Burkean, psycho-spiritual terror and its Longinian equivalent in simplicity, nobility and rhetoric. In the final section, the aforementioned sublime, evolving within putrefying sensibility against the ideological implications of the Wordsworthian egotistical sublime through de-personification of the ego and its somatocentric repositioning, shall be utilized in unearthing the potential of Keats’s less-researched sensevil sonnet, “Why did I laugh tonight? No voice can tell”, terminating in the generalization of such features and its specific contribution to the larger Romantic repository of the Keatsean sublime vis-à-vis Wordsworth.

Keywords

• keats
• burke
• sublimity
• poetry
• sense