The Medium of Poetry: Romantic Writing and the Cultural Politics of Physicality in "Hyperion"

This essay addresses the missing conversation in Keats studies by showing how an enduring mystery of Romantic writing—the medium of poetic process and the physical conditions of enunciation—remains a central question in the Hyperion fragments. It is my argument that the tropes of material textuality prevalent in the Hyperions represent a bold cultural statement in which Keats reacts to the major premises underlying the Romantic culture's notion of poetry as abstraction: the Romantic notion of literary (re)production as a product of the activity of a mind. Keats's self-conscious, symbolic representation of the mechanics of poetry-making can be read as an investigation of the ways in which the Romantics were aware of and even eager to articulate the instabilities of their position on the relations between words and things. This essay does not focus exclusively on the physical embodiment of Keats's work as such, so much as the second-generation Romantic poet's contribution to the Romantics' self-conscious and critical understanding of the depiction, perception and ideologies of their poetry and its mediation.