Keats's Boyish Imagination

For many readers, John Keats's achievement is to have attainted a supreme poetic maturity at so young an age. Canonical poems of resignation and acceptance such as 'To Autumn' are traditionally seen as examples par excellence of this maturity. In this highly innovative study, however, Marggraf Turley examines how, for Keats, an insistence on 'boyishness' in the midst of apparent mature imagery is the very essence of his political contestation of the literary establishment.

John Keats, famously, is the poet who aspired to, and managed to achieve, a supreme maturity; who progressed from the "namby-pamby" early lyrics to the "calm power" of the great Odes and the Hyperion poems. His "maturity" has become a cornerstone of recent political appraisals of his work. This book explores its subject over a range of poetical and psychological terrain to contend that immaturity -- the "Boyish imagination" -- is not only a more appropriate place from which to scrutinize Keats's political consciousness, but is itself the emphatic site of that consciousness.

If Keats could deploy puerility purposefully as a system of political interruption, his ambivalent stance towards the forms and functions of adulthood also exacerbated personal anxieties concerning "manly" behavior, finding what he called a "right feeling towards Women", and locating a poetic idiom that would be accepted by "grown-up reading audiences. In a series of profoundly surprising readings, focusing on themes such as feet and foot-related imagery, the breaking voice and female anatomy, this study of a major canonical figure alerts us to -- and opens a new perspective on -- the rich complexity of Keats the poet, Keats the man.