Facing Keats with Winnicott: On a New Therapeutics of Poetry‪.‬

IT IS REMARKABLE THAT, THROUGHOUT HIS BRIEF AND INCOMPARABLY IN tense writing career, Keats never ceased to insist upon the therapeutic function of poetry. From his buoyant declaration in the 1816 "Sleep and Poetry" that "the great end / Of poesy" is "that it should be a friend / To sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man" (245-47) to the anxious emphasis of the poet-narrator to Moneta in The Fall of Hyperion (1819) that "sure a poet is a sage; / A humanist, physician to all men" (189-90), Keats maintained this underlying therapeutic conception of art but found himself having to renew the terms of his claims. (1) Such work of re-assessment suggests the degree to which Keats's poetry may be read as a history of ongoing self--critique, of self--reading, the most complex episodes of which I suggest take place in the Odes of Spring 1819 and in The Fall of Hyperion. An examination of the transformation of his therapeutic conception of poetry may shed light on the vexed and much debated relationship between aesthetics and ethics in Keats's work. My present reading follows upon recent interventions by such critics as Forest Pyle and Robert Kaufman, who have sought to challenge the influential New Historicist judgment of Keats as guilty of repressing the sociopolitical and economic conditions of poetic production, of escaping from the world of human suffering into an idealized world of art, and fostering such tendencies in complicitous readers. Paying close attention to the textual workings of the poems themselves, Pyle, from a combination of Marxist and deconstructionist perspectives, and Kaufman, from a Marxist-Adornian perspective, both locate the critical force of Keats's poetry precisely in the way his poems unsettle their own stated positions and claims. (2)