Controlling Consumptions: The Life, Letters, and Poetry of John Keats

This paper explores the consumptive body as a controlling metaphor for Keats's poetic project.  By controlling the consumption of images and being the agent of this ascetic removal in "To Autumn," Keats exhibits a tempered power over his poetics that depletes without deleting entirely.   Paradoxically, the staying power of Keats's work comes from the permanence of the ephemeral, that combination of attenuation with endurance, characterized by the process of moving to an asymptotic limit that never disappears.  The biographical and the poetic merge in my reading of "To Autumn" as emblematic of Keats's struggle with and triumph over the fear of dissipation, of being consumed and forgotten.  This fear is both voiced and silenced in his last words, his tombstone inscription: "here lies one whose name was writ in water."  Keats leaves the reader of his poetry and his life with a remainder--a suspended image suggesting a total dissipation that is never realized.  He exerts control over images of consumption in his poetry to counter his lack of control over the consumption in his body.

By re-contextualizing Keats's letters, I show what has been overlooked--a reworking of the ephemeral that can be traced from the tombstone inscription, back to his autumn ode, to his notion of negative capability as pivotal to understanding his forceful poetics grounded in evanescence.  Keats's ode "To Autumn" and his tombstone inscription provide the images of ephemerality that inform my discussion of "controlling consumptions."  The ephemeral serves as a bridge between my figuring of consumption and the remainder which provides the key to unlocking a new reading of negative capability.  Despite the progress of the wasting consumption operating on his physical body, there is always the remainder of the self created through negation, through negative capability in which the Poet has no self but is forever bodying forth, filling his body of poetry.  He loses himself in the poetry he creates, as this poetry in turn creates him.

Keats's awareness of the power of his posthumous existence in memory over his fleeting existence in body led him to strive for a permanence in his work that he could not have in his life.  His wish is to be diffused over and consumed in the time and space of a lasting reputation.  Keats is consumed by disease and into poetry that extends beyond his physical existence.  The ephemerality of the poet is maintained in the shimmering moments of his poetry, and in his shimmering words of death on his tombstone that memorialize the poet.  Keats infuses permanence and power into these fragile moments which reflect the potency that his frail life attains in death, as that name written in water is carved in stone among the great English poets.

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