ABSTRACT
Keats and Shelley frequently reflect on the posthumous fate of poetry and poet. Their textual dynamics are generated by the authorial seifs attempt to determine its own reception. Critical accounts of these poetic operations often categorise Shelley’s angelic spirituality as haunted by spectral shades and Keats’s corporeality as a series of metonymies that invoke the poet’s deceased corpse.4 And yet Keats’s poetic narratives contain a catalogue of ghostly visitations, while the outcome of Shelley’s Adonais is governed by a reluctance to transcend the sensible world. Generically distinct, Shelley’s elegy and Keats’s The Eve of St. Mark are poetic meditations on literary posterity which tragically enact an awareness of themselves as a fictional defence against reality.5
