• Keats, Myth, and the Science of Sympathy

    Author(s):
    Gregory Tate (see profile)
    Date:
    2016
    Group(s):
    Victorian Studies
    Subject(s):
    Romanticism, Great Britain, Literature and science, Literature and medicine
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    British Romanticism, British Romantic poetry
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6XD0QX3W
    Abstract:
    This essay considers the connections between myth and sympathy in Keats’s poetic theory and practice. It argues that the ‘Ode to Psyche’ exemplifies the way in which Keats uses mythological narrative, and the related trope of apostrophe, to promote a restrained form of sympathy, which preserves an objectifying distance between the poet and the feelings that his poetry examines. This model of sympathy is informed by Keats’s medical training: the influential surgeon Astley Cooper and The Hospital Pupil’s Guide (1816) both identify a sensitive but restrained sympathy for patients’ suffering as an essential part of the scientific and professional methods of nineteenth-century medicine. However, while The Hospital Pupil’s Guide claims that mythological superstition has been superseded in medicine by positivist science, Keats’s ode suggests that myth retains a central role in poetry, as the foundation of a poetic method that mediates between imaginative sympathy and objective impartiality.
    Metadata:
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    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2016.0274
    Publisher:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Pub. Date:
    2016-6-16
    Journal:
    Romanticism
    Volume:
    22
    Issue:
    2
    Page Range:
    191 - 202
    ISSN:
    1354-991X,1750-0192
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    5 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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