4 - “O Read for Pity's Sake!”: Keats's Endymion

Summary

JOHN KEATS'S ENDYMION: A POETIC ROMANCE begins with a famous assertion of immortality: “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever” (1.1). Chief among the poet's examples of deathless loveliness is the tale he is about to tell of Endymion, for it depicts “the grandeur of the dooms / We have imagined for the mighty dead.” It belongs among the “lovely tales that we have heard or read” issuing from “an endless fountain of immortal drink” whose source is the realms of heaven (1.20–24).

Why would Keats expect himself or his audience to gain access to the immortality of beauty by reading about the doings of the dead?

I am proposing that the answer to this question runs as follows: Romantic poetics often associate undying aesthetic power with reading about the “mighty dead,” and therefore a Romantic narrative wishing to invoke the power of the aesthetic moment will very often make a gesture equivalent to Keats's rhyme of “dead” and “read.” Such a narrative is quite likely to depict as part of its story the revivification of apparently lifeless matter in a scene of reading.