ABSTRACT
By engaging the language of pharmacology, Arthur Symons perceives John Keats's poetry in terms of potent essences and dilutions. Decadent works by Symons and Dowson have evolved as reactions to, continuities with, variations, and half-negations of Keats's multifarious poetics of the intoxicating senses. In Romantic Medicine and John Keats, Hermione de Almeida argues that in Keats's artistic vision, the role of poetry was medicinal or palliative. De Almeida looks at Keats's morbid medicine, pathology, and nosology, finding interesting amalgamations between the healing and the toxic in Keats's imagery of sensuous drugs. Symons's poems feature a variety of inebriations in the poet's erotic experiences: a world of heady perfumes, erotic moods, poisonous memories, and synaesthesia. These intoxications register a commanding desire for a Lethean state of being, a thrill so hypersensuous that aspires to cancel itself, evoking Keats's states of trancelike numbness, Symons even explores exclusively the motif of the 'wine of forgetfulness' in his play Tristan and Iseult.
