Owing to Psyche
“Owing to Psyche” examines Keats’s well‐known ode to address the long‐standing debate concerning poetry’s justice. Poetry alternately is said to have an important moral function in telling us truths about ourselves, to be harmful because it misrepresents truths otherwise accessible, or to function as mere pleasurable entertainment. In particular, Keats exemplifies a familiar portrayal of Romantic poets and, by extension, Romanticism proper, as maturing from an early, naive faith in the just ends of poetry to a later demystification that culminates in an ostensibly more modern, truer conception of “art for art’s sake,” or mere poetry. Keats’s Psyche, however, undermines the progressive schemes on which this understanding of Romanticism and literary history relies. Rendering the choice between early and late, like that between just and mere poetry, inoperative, my reading of Keats’s ode collapses the delimitation of “Romanticism” as a particular moment within a progressive literary history, and therewith an...