ABSTRACT
In this study of John Keats’s work, which is closely attributed to his elegiac mourning of his mother and his brother, I show how Keats’s inner representation of the deceased pertains to his worshipful containment of the mythological figure of Psyche, and how his poetic axioms regard personal loss. This reconstruction of the Psyche myth is a Romantic alternative to the classical Greek period that captivated Keats as a youth. Keats’s perpetuating the endlessness of his grief forbears Freud’s model of the elegiac ego and the internalization of a lost object. This chapter will specifically be looking at Keats’s 1819 odes, letters, and biography.
