The Many Faces of Nature: An Ecocritical Reading of the Concepts of Wilderness and the Sublime in John Keats’ Selected Poems
Article Sidebar
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Anafora provides open access to all its content to support greater global exchange of knowledge. Articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction of the full texts of the journal’s articles and allows readers to use them for any other lawful purpose, without the author’s and the publisher’s permission, provided that the original work is properly cited.
Copyright for articles published in this journal is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the journal (this applies to both the print and electronic issues). By virtue of their appearance in this open access journal, articles are free to use, with proper attribution.
Main Article Content
Abstract
This paper examines the concepts of Wilderness and the Sublime and discusses different views of nature in John Keats’ poetry through the theoretical lens of ecocriticism. Analysing the poems “O Solitude!” (1816), “On the Sea” (1817), “Written Upon the Top of Ben Nevis” (1838), and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (1819), it employs two ecocritical approaches – Deep Ecology and “The Dark Mountain Project” – to point out that Keats’ conception of nature is both ecocentric and highly sceptical, apprehensive of humanity’s precariousness and vulnerability in the face of it. It argues that such an oxymoronic, albeit still highly potent and relevant take on the dichotomy between man and nature is in line with Keats’ self-definition as a “chameleon poet” who takes many forms and is able to observe things from different viewpoints.