Two sides of the same coin: A study of Apollonian and Dionysian impulses in selected works of John Keats

Abstract

This dissertation examines selected narrative and lyric poems from the final collection of poetry published during Keats's lifetime, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems (1820). It does so through the lens of Nietzsche's conception of Apollonian and Dionysian artistic impulses as explicated in his The Birth of Tragedy (1872). Although Keats died fifty one years before the first publication of Nietzsche's treatise, from the beginning stages of his poetry, Keats showed a sensible awareness of what he called a 'complex Mind', which is: 'one that is imaginative and at the same time careful of its fruits, who would exist partly on sensation, partly on thought'. To my mind, Keats's development of his own 'complex Mind' reaches its greatest achievement in this final collection of poetry. Consequently, Nietzsche's notion of Apollonian and Dionysian impulses (which, in overly simple terms, can be seen to draw on, respectively, 'thought' and 'sensation'), provides a suitable framework to interpret the selected poems from this volume. Moreover, I attempt to show that by investigating the interaction between these two artistic drives in the selected poems, we will be able to better comprehend the relation between both aspects of his 'complex Mind'. The selected poems are further grouped into two main chapters: one focusing on three of Keats's narrative verse romances and the other focusing on four of his lyrical odes.

Chapter one contextualises the research problem of the dissertation while also shedding light on the pertinence of the Nietzschean ideal of Apollonian and Dionysian impulses for a Romantic study. Furthermore, I also identify the main research aims and establish the theoretical framework of the dissertation in this section. Chapter two focuses on the interaction between the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses in three of Keats's narrative verse romances: Lamia, Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil,and The Eve of St. Agnes. Accordingly, it considers narrative elements such as theme, plot and character, as well as their relations with one another in the light of the theoretical framework of the study. Chapter three will bring us closer to the poet himself (as lyric poetry inevitably does) and I will focus on the intermingling and counterbalancing relationship which exists between Apollonian and Dionysian impulses in relation to the poet's creative process in four of his great odes: 'Ode to a Nightingale', 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', 'Ode to Psyche', and 'To Autumn'. This creative process, I argue, includes, inter alia, the interplay among the following components: the empathetical imagination and the immortalising thereof through the structural craftsmanship of a technically sound poem; imagination and the plastic arts (sculpture); the abstract and the concrete; and spontaneous immersion in nature and the conscious employment of language. Finally, the fourth chapter will provide concluding remarks and a summation of the key findings of the study.