Keats’s Sense of Family History: Isabella and The Eve of St. Agnes

ABSTRACT Romantic impulses govern the fraught, family histories in these poems on conflicts that disrupt or threaten loss to lovers. In Isabella Keats explores a young woman’s resistance to her brothers’ machinations. In The Eve of St. Agnes Madeline confronts an uncertain future, either in her family’s bastion or in Porphyro’s domains. The attention to romantic energy in both poems discloses Keats’s entrance into the manners, attitudes, striking poses that dominate the participants in mercantile and feudal realms. To what these participants say and do, he contributes elements of dirge, musical instruments, furnishings, stark landscapes, and historic accounts of cruelties and exploitation. Mythical allusion, unexpected humour, dream dialogue contribute to the embrace of the inexplicable. The texture of the poems argues that Keats’s engagement with family history is a recognition that the milieus he creates have an afterlife, that the recovery of an imagined past is not limiting but has currency for his own time future generations. His engagement with family history also draws him to his own circumstances, for, he turns to his own romantic desires, writing to George and Georgianna Keats that he believes that he will be among the English poets.