ABSTRACT
Closer examination opens a narrative into an intriguing libidinal economy, founded on what Keats himself called his ‘Boyish imagination’. Keats’s ambivalent relationship with ‘manliness’ has often been remarked on. By focusing on Diana’s feet, a fetishized substitute for the missing phallus, Keats hopes to avoid unpleasant thoughts of castration. His efforts seem not to have been wholly successful, however. In The Fall of Hyperion, too, the fetishized foot provides a point of entry into a libidinal economy in which ‘normal’ relations between Keats’s male narrators and the women who share their poetic domain are disabled by phallic anxiety and genital aversion. The dreamer emerges from his post-prandial slumber to find the surroundings of the ‘mossy mound and arbour’ transformed into the carved walls of an ‘old sanctuary’. Keats’s diminutive proportions were a constant source of embarrassment. Keats seems to have considered himself in competition with a certain sort of man.
