Keats and Scepticism

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

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

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

Voltaire, Keats, and Keats's circle

Voltaire's scepticism in Philosophical Dictionary

Voltaire's historiography and Hyperion

Voltaire's conte philosophique and Isabella

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'