Keats and Scepticism explores Keats’s affinity with the philosophical tradition of scepticism and reads Keats’s poetry anew in the light of this affinity. It suggests Keats’s links with the origin of scepticism in ancient Greece as recorded in Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Scepticism. It also discusses Keats’s connections with Montaigne, the most important Renaissance inheritor of Pyrrhonian scepticism; Voltaire, the Enlightenment philosophe whose sceptical ideas made an indelible impact on Keats; and Hume, the most thoroughgoing sceptic after antiquity. Other than Keats’s affinitive ideas with these sceptical thinkers, this book is particularly interested in Keats’s experiments with the peculiar language, forms, modes, and genres of poetry to convey the non-dogmatic philosophy. In this light, it re-reads Isabella, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, the 1819 odes, the two Hyperions, King Stephen, and Lamia, all of which reveal Keats’s self-reflexive and radical sceptical poetics in challenging poetic dogmas and conventions.
This book is for Keats lovers, students, teachers, scholars, or non-academic readers who are interested in Romanticism, nineteenth-century studies, or poetry and philosophy in general. This original, accessible interdisciplinary study aims to offer the reader a fresh perspective to read Keats and appreciate the quintessential Keatsian poetics.
Introduction
Keats’s sceptical poetics
The term ‘scepticism’
Romantic scepticism
Structure of this book
Chapter One Keats and Pyrrhonian Scepticism: Sextus Empiricus
Sceptic: non-dogmatic and investigative
Scepticism: definition and key elements
Sextus, Keats, and Medicine
Sceptical language and sceptical poetics
Keats’s self-reflexive sceptical poetics in Lamia
Chapter Two Keats and Renaissance Scepticism: Montaigne
Montaigne’s inheritance of Pyrrhonian scepticism
Montaigne’s development of Pyrrhonian scepticism
Keats and Montaigne: affinitive ideas
Keats’s sceptical ‘essays’: the 1819 spring odes
Montaigne in the Keats circle
Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Hamlet
Keats and Hamlet
Intersection of Keats, Hamlet, and Montaigne
Chapter Three Keats and Enlightenment scepticism: Voltaire
Voltaire, Keats, and Keats’s circle
Voltaire’s scepticism in Philosophical Dictionary
Voltaire’s historiography and Hyperion
Voltaire’s conte philosophique and Isabella
Chapter Four Keats and Enlightenment scepticism: Hume
Hume, Keats, and Hazlitt
Hume’s scepticism about our understanding of the external world and ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’
Hume’s scepticism about our notion of the self and King Stephen
Excessive scepticism and The Fall of Hyperion
Temperate scepticism in ‘To Autumn’
Afterword
Biography
Li Ou, PhD in English (Literary Studies), the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is Associate Professor in the Department of English, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Keats and Negative Capability (2009), ‘Keats, Sextus Empiricus, and Medicine’ (Romanticism 22:2 (2016), 167-76), ‘Keats’s Afterlife in Twentieth-Century China’ (English Romanticism in East Asia: A Romantic Circles PRAXIS Volume, 2016), ‘Romantic, Rebel, and Reactionary: The Metamorphosis of Byron in Twentieth-Century China’ (British Romanticism in Asia, 2019), ‘Two Chinese Wordsworths: The Reception of Wordsworth in Twentieth-Century China’ (Romantic Legacies: Transnational and Transdisciplinary Contexts, Routledge, 2019), and ‘Keats, Montaigne, and Hamlet’ (East-West Dialogues: The Transferability of Concepts in the Humanities, 2021). Her research interests include Romantic poetry, especially that of Keats, and cultural/literary relations between Greater China and Britain.
In this original and important monograph, Li Ou presents compelling evidence that Keats in his letters and poems builds upon the ancient and Enlightenment tradition of scepticism. This chimes with his own habitual, ‘equipollent’ modes of thought, tempering his ‘ardent’ idealism and sensuousness with intellectual doubts and ‘vexing speculations’.
Robert S. White, Emeritus Professor, The University of Western Australia
A deeply researched and enjoyably accessible new study of Keats, strikingly original in its perspectives on the poet’s intellectual affinity with the sceptical tradition in philosophy. The argument is complemented by fresh and insightful readings of the poetry, and underpinned by persuasive reflection on the presence of philosophical scepticism in Keats’s Romantic milieu. This book changes the terms of reference for our understanding of Keats as a thinker.
Kelvin Everest, Emeritus A. C. Bradley Professor of Modern Literature, University of Liverpool
