ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the Victorian afterlife of John Keats and demonstrates how he was hailed as the Prototype Aesthete in the hands of Oscar Wilde. At the outset of his career, Wilde invigorated a particular Keatsian afterimage, at once paying homage to the neglected tomb of Keats in Rome and enshrining the Romantic poet at the core of his Aestheticism. For Wilde, Keats’s pursuit of a life of sensations renders him a pure and serene artist. Keats’s notion of the “poetical character” provides Wilde the best dynamism to engage in self-fashioning. As Keats’s “poetical character” “lives in gusto” by “enjoy[ing] light and shade,” so Wilde values the bodily and sensuous reality that comprises both human identity and the production of art. I examine Wilde’s lifelong admiration and adaptation of Keats, focusing particularly on the four principal phases of his career with “The Tomb of Keats,” “The English Renaissance of Art,” The Picture of Dorian Gray, and, notably, De Profundis. Where Keats’s ideal is materialised in his famous dyad Hyperion-Apollo in Hyperion: A Fragment, I show that Wilde similarly crafts his own dyad Christ-Marsyas in De Profundis in order to fashion a new image and voice for the fin de siècle.
