Anxieties And Transcendence: A Study Of John Keats' Writing Of Identities

As one of the second generation of English Romanticism,John Keats gained his reputation through forging unique aesthetic pursuits,forming in-depth poetic criticism and creating a special poetic style against his miserable life experience.Ranking among great poets,he enriched English Romanticism and British poetic tradition as a whole.As a poet of self-retrospective spirit,Keats composed poems to represent his strong desire,which,however,was permeated with a sense of haunted anxieties,that is,he was anxious about the death,religion,poetic fame,sexuality,class and politics,etc.The poet's anxieties embody his careful speculation over his self-identity,his personal identity and collective identity consisting of sexuality identity and national identity as well as racial identity.Fundamentally,his anxieties of identities essentially stemmed out of the self-other/Other relationships,featured with multiple facets and layers interwoven with each other.His writing of such an identity issue acts as a way to convey,represent,and transcend such anxieties.Keats not only wrote of anxieties in his letters to friends and relatives,but also took poetry as the domain and practice of representing and transcending anxieties of identities.Thus,an in-depth exploration of his poetry is a medium through which we readers can comprehend him as the person and as the poet and his poetic thoughts as well.Relevant literary critical theories and philosophical thoughts have been adopted to provide targeting and sound theoretical interpretations and strategies to approach the reading of those anxieties.Descartes' s analysis of subjectivity,Heidegger's existentialism,Freud's psychological analysis and Lacan's and Ziz?k's interpretations of anxieties have been adopted to define the anxieties of identities.Originating from the Renaissance and Romanticism,certain specific thoughts on death,eternality,soul and body,time and space,religious beliefs have been referred to in elaborating the poet's anxiety of self identity.Bloom's elaboration of “anxiety of influence” and Said's expatiation of the intellectuals have been taken into account to explore the poet's anxiety of personal identity.The expatiations of “gaze” from Lacan,Ziz?k,Foucault and Greenblatt,Hegel's analyses of master-slave relationship,Gilbert and Gubar's female discourse,together with Foucault's interpretation of power discourse containing sexuality,madness,punishment,etc have been implemented to expound poet's anxiety of sexual identity.Said's theories of post-colonialism,and Linda Colley and Anderson's interpretations of nationalism and construction of national identity provide corresponding referential angles and strategies to expatiate the poet's anxieties of collective identity,represented through both anxieties of national identity and of racial identity.Keats explored the anxiety of self identity against the approaching death and hardly-acquired religion salvation.A series of misfortunes including family tragedies,chronological lung disease,the imminent death of precursors and peers drove him into the anxiety of his own death before gaining poetic fame.Thus the fear for anticipated death and desire for life,death atmosphere,and lung symptom dominated his poetry writing,and the poet endeavored to transcend the anxiety of death through depicting six facets ranging from being-towards-death,dying for living,bearing death in living,nature nurturing to mutual nurturing between nature and human beings.Also,While Keats' s attitude towards religion was inevitably influenced by social atmosphere,romantic thoughts,life environment,and intimate friends,he “mystified” and “demystified” the religion in his poetic writing that represents his deeply-rooted anxiety.Instead of being confined to anxiety,Keats eventually injected Greek mythology and Celtic pantheism of the secular spirits to transcend his anxiety of self-identity.Although absorbing much from the precursors,Keats seemed to struggle harder to overcome “the anxiety of influence” in order to conquer the anxiety of personal identity.On t “he one hand,Keats took in the marrows in view of poetic form,style,techniques,characterization,plot and on the other,he developed his own Keatsian poetic style in order to break free from the precursors.He abandoned Spenser's worship of regalism and insisted on humanism.He gave up Shakespeare's “fatalism” and foregrounded human being's “subjective selection”.Shadowed by Milton,He merged the distinction between poetry and painting,illustrated the game between Christianity and pantheism,and sublimed the humanitarianism in order to transcend the former.He complemented the absence of “epic nature” in Burns and formed Keatsian “sublimity of nature”.He eventually fulfilled Wordsworth's “eternal nature” through his “imagined nature”.In view of imagination,Keats deviated from Coleridge's Gothic imagination and fulfilled within the poems his own fancy.He spurned Byron's “realistic writing” and realized Keatsian “imaginative writing”.Besides,he composed “humanitarianism” that enabled him to elevate Shelley's “heroism”.In handling with the sexuality,Keats held sexual anxieties of both male and female identities.As for the writing of anxiety of female sexuality,he portrayed the “angel-in-the house” type of female through male-dominated “gaze” to highlight his intention to identify with the collective identity.Simultaneously,he portrayed female's “anti-gaze” filled with sexual attraction to foreground female's resistance to the male-dominated social regime,thus demonstrating the poet's refusal to identify with conventional social values,and indirectly representing his anxiety as well.Meanwhile,through depicting the “anti-gaze” of “femmes fatales”,Keats illustrated “evil” women's resistance against the social conventions and the consequential discipline and punishment they received from the the dominant criteria.In such writing stems the poet's anxiety of sexual identity again.Eventually,the poet integrated the “good “and “evil” qualities into the ideal female figure to transcend the his anxiety of sexuality identity.In view of describing his identification with the male,the poet depicted the interpersonal confrontation among males,illustrating both male-to-male and male-to-collective conflicts in the efforts for establishing male sexual identity.Besides,Keats endeavored to demonstrate the intimate and harmonious relationship among males through poetry writing ranging from individuality,age to collectiveness and in such writing his anxiety of male gender identity and his certain efforts to overcome such an anxiety in view of male discourse and national power are expatiated in-depth.In writing of transcending national identity and racial identity,Keats composed poetry with the internal anxious feelings.The family atmosphere,friends' discussion,peers' pressure,precursors' guide,and social political atmosphere,etc set him into speculating over his national and racial identities.In his poems,he not only focused on depicting certain anxieties of identifying with England,Scotland and Ireland,but also represented his goal of constructing national identity of the Great Britain with England as its core,and in such a writing,his efforts to transcend the anxiety of national identity are indicated.Furthermore,in depicting his anxieties of the colonized continents and countries including North America,Africa,and India,Keats on the one hand “gazed” the “colonized” with bias,since he was inevitably influenced by the Orientalist atmosphere,but on the other hand,he as an intellectual,endeavored to identify with the colonized people due to his humanitarian thoughts in order to gain the fundamental transcendence over the anxiety of racial identity.