'Time's wide wings' : concepts of time in British romantic poetry with particular reference to the work of John Keats

Abstract

With a particular focus on Keats, this thesis explores some of the insights offered by British Romantic poetry into both the sense of time as experienced and lived by the individual and as described by history. Keats's work is placed in relation to some of the issues concerning temporality that were current during the Romantic Period in order to show how his creative endeavour both conforms to and resists its historical and cultural moment. This study therefore focuses on the ways some key arguments about time and history which Keats encountered within the cultural moment of English Romanticism, such as totalising models of progress and decline and relations between the past, present and future, are confirmed as well as reworked and tested in his poems so that multiple approaches to temporality are explored alongside each other. In addition, the thesis is especially concerned with the ways that Keats's explorations of time and history may be considered to collide with our own preoccupations, and proposes that contemporary readers of Keats may situate the concepts explored in his work alongside concerns and issues regarding temporality which are still being debated today. The central argument of the thesis is therefore that Romantic poetry, and Keats's work in particular, is as much concerned with the existential and with an engagement with the realities of life as it is with the aesthetic, and that the approach to temporality within these poems is complex and protean, capable of accommodating conflicting views, so that, as we read the poems today from our present vantage point, the issues they raise about temporality and history may be interwoven with contemporary debate, illuminating what most concerns us in our own time.