Keats Life Of Allegory

As Marjorie Levinson compellingly argues in Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style, these contemporary reviews saw in Keats’s poems namely, a social-ego enterprise of a middling class, the self fashioning gestures of the petty bourgeois. Levinson is primarily interested in Keats’s style as the manifestation of his class ambition, but her argument is equally germane to Keats’s conceptualization of negative capability: it is part and parcel of his self-fashioning gestures. In a letter to Hessey, Keats claims that he was never afraid of failure and would sooner fail than not be among the greatest (Keats, Selected Poems and Letters, 1959, p. 193). His styling himself as a negatively capable camelion Poet in the letter to Woodhouse is a reclamation of membership in the poets’ society. And it is the greatest society of those capable of sympathetic imagination, supervised over by the bard. In his exercise of negative capability, his version of sympathy, he acts just like Shakespeare; or, he enacts Shakespeare.
Levinson critiques Keats criticism in general for its commitment to a recognized Keats which suppresses what Keats’s contemporary reviews called vulgarity, the marker of his class origin and class ambition. She observes that rescuing Keats …show more content…
Keats negotiates what we call the actor’s version of the theatrics of sympathy. This chapter, from now on, goes to show Keats mediates his poetic ideal of sympathy/ negative capability and anti-ideal of the egotistical sublime and along with them, his developing conception of his own status as a poet and the text of the analysis is devoted to a reading of “This Living Hand,” examining the way in which this poem-fragment turns sympathy on its head and reveals the problematic aspects of it, especially, the difference between the supply and demand of