Romanticism In Kate Rigby's Endogamy

It is to this same end that Keats cultivates the silent grounds of his sanctuary for Psyche, with everything that “the gardener Fancy e’er could feign” (62). In his discussion on Hölderlin, Heidegger reminds us that the poetic is not “merely an ornament and bonus added to dwelling” – but its simultaneous goal and condition. As the appeal to “poesy” in “Sleep and Poetry” tells us, its “sanctuary” carries the promise of “clear air, / Smoothed from intoxication by the breath / Of flowering bays” (56–58). In Endymion, we have already seen how “the flowery band” of beauty that grounds the being easily turns into the “unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways / Made for our searching”. Likewise, the perfumed air of the “flowering bays” also contains the …show more content…
Rigby’s concern stems from the “anthropocentric hubris” she ascribes to Heidegger, primarily on account of his strict distinction between animals and plants vis-à-vis human beings that exist through language. The primacy of the human subject in it’s naming of the world points, for Rigby, to a general negligence of “the diverse alterity of a flourishing more-than-human earth”: an earth that always contains “an inassimilable otherness that overwhelms our ability to understand, command and consume it.” If such a critique may seem to depart so far from Heidegger’s premises as to loose some of it’s bearing, Rigby’s demand for Romantic studies to stray from the Heideggerian matrix traditionally invoked by ecocriticism is all the more relevant. To conclude my discussion on Keats, I would, therefore, like to consider his precarious relation to nature as a possible response to this call for an unromantic Romanticism. If the previous investigation into the mind’s dwelling took aim at the primary domain of the subject, I here want to sketch the principal coordinates of its margins: namely, the site of the self’s destabilizing and effacement in the world of living