![]() ![]() ![]() This is, indeed, a serendipitous modern-day connection because, curiously, in Keats’s inventory of celestial habitudes and material entities that the poet can literally em-body, he exempts the stars. Of course, in our modern parlance Keats’s descriptive soul-phrase the space battles, light sabers, and padawans of Star Wars conjures up it does. Referencing the poetical character in his letter to Richard Woodhouse, he writes “it does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one” (387). ![]() If Keats’s letters, as is popularly claimed, are a teleological journal of soul-making in the vale of poiesis, then the dialectical dance in this letter between light and dark, substance and shadow, real and spectral, throws eerie light on an unsettling feature of Keats’ ensouling: the otherworldly evanescence of the self as co-constitutive of any self. Keats employs a perplexingly opaque phrase-“the dark side”-in his famous letter on the chameleon-like nature of the poet, one that invokes, appropriately enough, the time of year in which he was writing, Halloween, with its phantasms and fantastic apparitions, shades, demons, devils, and damned souls creeping around the corners of the spirit world into the real. RE: Keats’s 27 October 1818 letter to Richard Woodhouse ![]()
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