ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the emotional position John Keats tried to develop and maintain, both in relation to the writing of poetry and to the living of his life. Keats's idealism is of an order that links it to Wordsworth's, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and Shelley's, in the Defence of Poetry. Keats extended Hazlitt's 'disinterestedness' to include both a necessary preparedness, through tolerance of uncertainty and doubt, to enter imaginatively into the world of another, with, in addition, a renunciation of designs upon the reader. The practices and attitudes of the real-life Dr Blanche feed into the character of Dr Noir in Alfred de Vigny's novel Stello, Noir who tolerates, and inflicts, boredom and silence, but not sentimentality. Edgar Allan Poe offers Auguste Dupin, the first fully fledged detective in Western fiction, whose lateral mode of thinking adumbrates that of the working psychoanalyst.
