Keats, Distance, and Feeling-States

Abstract:This essay extrapolates from John Jones on Keats's "feeling-states" a counterhistoricist aesthetics also germane to minoritized and postcolonial writers, and to the global citizen haplessly, today, immersed in streams of news-data. Revisiting Jerome McGann's famous attack on "To Autumn" and its "romantic ideology" (theparadigmatic instance of historicism confronting a resistant text), I consider "Dear Reynolds, as last night I lay in bed," Isabella; Or, the Pot of Basil, and the poetry of Claudia Rankine and Martin Carter, and Carter and Nissim Ezekiel's criticism, to suggest the thinking of poets about the relation of creativeness to politics outgoes critical assumptions.