#Freudian pleasure principle series#

Leavis, in a characteristically tortured, though brilliantly tortuous essay, also noticed something close to this: ‘an inherent contradiction: so strong a grasping at fullness of life implies a constitution, a being, that could not permanently refuse completeness of being’ (Leavis: 211-12).Īfter the horrors of the First World War, Sigmund Freud felt compelled to draw back from his detailed, psychoanalytic practice and reflect on his discoveries at a higher, more abstracted level. ‘A traumatic, broken relationship with his mother … created a pattern of possession and abandonment which runs throughout his poems’ (Andrew Motion). This is the ‘deep structure’ of so many of Keats’ greatest odes and lyrics. In compelling, sensuous descriptions throughout his poetry, his ‘choiceness of detail’, the reader is, precisely, possessed by the physical charm of Keats’ lines, ‘candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd … lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon’ (‘The Eve’ XXX), from which we are then expelled, abandoned as tragic development unfolds. Possession and subsequent abandonment are at the heart of Keats’ poetic obsession. The First World War poet, Edward Thomas, wrote in his study of Keats (1916), that the form ‘exhibits the poet’s choiceness of detail’, and ‘Isabella became with the help of the adagio stanza a very still poem’.

#Freudian pleasure principle series#

Agnes’, but has a similar structure, a series of numbered, discrete stanzas. ‘ Isabella or, The Pot of Basil’ was composed during spring of 1818, a year earlier than ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ avoid this troubling aspect of Porphyro’s behaviour? Keats clearly struggled to find the right tone here, as the numerous revisions to stanza XXVI suggest (Allott ed. This is a conventional device in many ballads, and Shakespeare’s Cymbeline 2.2 dramatizes the unsettling voyeurism of such a plot. Porphyro asks to be taken in ‘close secrecy’ to Madeline’s bedroom, and hidden ‘That he might see her beauty unespied’ (166). Agnes’ graphically sets the scene for the tragedy, and with Keatsian lines that, once read, may be always remembered – ‘The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass’ (3). Another baleful precedent for Madeline and Porphyro are, of course, Juliet and Romeo – lovers risking their lives because divided by antagonistic families: ‘For him, those chambers held barbarian hordes’ (86). She was martyred during the reign of the Emperor Diocletian, 306 CE, ‘condemned to be debauched in the common stews before her execution, but her virginity was miraculously preserved by lightning and thunder from Heaven’ (Brand 1813).

Agnes provided an ominous, early Christian resonance for Keats’ lovers. Agnes’ in reaction, a kind of fluent, poetic relaxation.

Keats had been struggling with the composition of his highly ambitious epic in the classical style, Hyperion. He was certainly inspired by his obsession with Frances (Fanny) Brawne, whom he had met just a year before. He claimed that there was no literary source for the poem, but that it derived from ‘popular superstition’. Agnes’ in just over two weeks at the beginning of 1819, revising the text at Winchester during September. ‘Ours is an age of anxiety from the crown to the hovel, from the cradle to the coffin all is an anxious striving to maintain life, or appearances – to rise, as the only condition of not failing.’ -Samuel Taylor Coleridge ‘In both Keats and Freud, feminine narcissism finds its perfect partner in the male gaze.’