Feminism & John Keats

John Keats, a male poet of the Romantic period, is not always equated with feminism.

Often, more than not, Keats is seen as a figurehead of Romanticism. And Romanticism is anything but a healthy view of the world. We see it as a rosy lens, used to uphold Shakespeare and England (or Albion), Spenser and knights, Kit and medievalism.

So, Keats may be seen as among his contemporaries, like Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Wordsworth, as aides or abetters in the injustice, rather than the crime, of patriarchy. While this may be a little heavy-handed, Romanticism and its modes of thought are patriarchal in origin. This all comes to fruition with Napoleon Bonaparte and his adage, "Women are factories for babies."

The Romantic period came out of the French Revolution; it was the Napoleonic period, for better or worse. It did view nature as perfection, the medieval period as better times, forests and mountains as sublimity, women as virtuous feminine energy, and men as either beasts or emotional agents in a sea of elves, goblins, nymphs, and dragon-centaurs.

Viewing gender relations through the prism of medieval institutions of knighthood might help us unlock Keats' critique of the patriarchy and burgeoning capitalism.

But I think John Keats is a feminist, maybe in spite of his role in Romanticism. He died early, lived frugally, wrote prophetically and prolifically, and became a symbol of eternal youth. Like a chalice of potent poesy!

This is because his poetry brims with feminist perspectives. His "Sonnets to Woman" take the phallocentric view of the singular, monolithic "Woman," and turns it on its head. Where her beauty and innocence are characterized through a "milk-white lamb" in the site of her body, a "dove-like bosom" to be exact, the reader is instead forced to reckon with an unfixed feminine:

... In truth there is no freeing

One's thoughts from such a beauty; when I hear

A lay that once I saw her hand awake,

Her form seems floating palpable, and near;

Had I e'er seen her from an arbour take

A dewy flower, oft would that hand appear,

And o'er my eyes the trembling moisture shake.

John Keats, Three Sonnets to a Woman, III

I emphasise "from such a beauty," a construction or turn-of-phrase Keats uses to highlight the beauties of the Romantic imaginary or, in more vulgar terms, the male fantasy. I think this feminist perspectives permeates John Keats' poetry, in stark contrast to the burgeoning capitalism and exchange of woman as a commodity, an idealised eternal feminine (to use Goethe's term), or factory for babies.

Take "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," a ballad in which a knight in shining armour tries to free or save a damsel in distress, only to find he is trapped in a fen with a tricking temptress, rather than the elfin grot of Spenserian stanzas; the knight finds himself in a lifeless, muddy bog where wights and ghosts of dead knights go to haunt men who follow their path.

Keats' damsel is a monster that lures men to their muddy doom.

I have given my thoughts on the poem, and the overlooked subject of Keats' feminism, in this audio recording:

Please give it a listen and remember to always read poetry aloud. It will come alive then. Your voice can always do the job of a necromancer, and bring something dead to unlife!