ABSTRACT

John Keats’s romantic sense of avowed disappointment with ideas and ideals in their empirically real historical formations in as-yet unexplored spectral ways informs a key trope of modernism: that of the destructive element. Spender’s effort to defend the new (modernism) from the old (romanticism and perhaps realism) seems to be itself an anxious manifestation of unacknowledged disappointment. Haunting is clearly an experience of pain and disappointment, thwarting the promise of either happiness or a cure from suffering the sight of destruction’s core through the gathering of flowers. Acknowledging the presence of the romantic and modern spell of disenchantment amounts to avowing of a sense of disappointment from Keats’s promise of happiness to the rude awakening in the ghostly haunting or the empirical destruction at work at sea, which the poetic voice then defines as its discovery of the true elemental core of life and nature.