ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to bring two prominent, yet contradictory, conceptions of John Keats’s imagination into critical alignment. Although commentators on Keats’s writing have long emphasized as distinctive a prevailing psychological ambivalence toward its subjects, more recent critics—especially those concerned with the poet’s situation in historicist debates—have tended to orientate Keats’s works along rather more rigidly resolute political axes, demoting or at least setting to one side those earlier emphases on ambivalence. In the discussion that follows, the ideological complexities inherent in the contemporary vogue aesthetic of the picturesque are found to provide an unexpected aperture through which Keats’s temperamental ambivalences, on the one hand, and political allegiances, on the other hand, can be kaleidoscoped into focus. The result is a revaluation of Keats’s achievement, particularly as regards “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “To Autumn,” which aims to unsettle and invigorate the historicist conclusions of recent commentators on these later enunciations.
