‘Sick within the rose’s just domain’: the ‘Material Sublime’ and Pathological Poetics in Keats’s Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil

Abstract

This essay examines Keats’s unique pathological poetics in Isabella. It argues that the destructiveness of the love between Isabella and Lorenzo is not only brought forth by her brothers’ violent interference but is already present in their relationship. Apart from the conflict between innocent love and cruel reality, Keats accentuates the innate danger of erotic love, whose power does not lie in the fulfilment of desire and its liberation from moral restraints and class barriers, but in the unhealthy and self-destructive aspects of the human body and psyche. Keats presents this unique phenomenon through a form of pathological poetics, which, at the end of the poem, actualises his concept of the ‘material sublime’ as pertaining to human suffering, especially inasomatic sense. Such a representation of erotic love corresponds to Keats’s understanding of poetic creation. In Isabella, both erotic love and poetic creation are Keatsian experiences of self-annihilation.

Keywords

• john keats
• isabella
• the material sublime
• eroticism
• self-annihilation