ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses that the semantic and psychic contours of genitally focused episodes in John Keats are further shaped by the poet’s equivocal relationship with two ostensibly discrete, but in fact mutually complicating, epistemologies regarding women’s ‘reality’. It argues that allusions to sexual intercourse and sexual anatomy in Keats typically mark excruciating textual junctures where coherencies of Self, as well as poetic register and diction, break down and threaten to dissolve altogether. Keats may have given up his medical career for poetry, but years of training had left him with several unbanishable images. Keats’s knowledge of the anatomy and biological function of the female body, acquired through years of obstetric and surgical training, greatly exceeded that of any of his ‘knowing’ friends and acquaintances. Keats’s social and medical education proved to be a mutually vexing admixture.