ABSTRACT
The Romantic poet-physician is a figure well known to scholars. John Keats is his most famous iteration, though the title is often applied to William Wordsworth as well. In the past ten years, several critics have attempted to answer the question of how Wordsworth’s poetry heals, while studies of Keats’s poetic therapy are perennial, from monographs in the 1980s and 1990s exploring Keats as “poet-physician” to a issue of the journal Romanticism devoted to the topic. The poet-physician is physician to “all men” because he is the world’s sagest humanist. Both Keats and Wordsworth assume that readers will be healed by their poetry because all readers share a human nature to which poets have privileged access. This idea is common in critical portraits of the poet-physician. Many scholars have attempted to source it. Physicians in particular typically cast medicine as a sort of ur-science and defined it variously as “the study of man” or “the study of human nature.”.
