“Round every circle another can be drawn”: entwining John Keats and Emily Dickinson to re-draw the circle of nineteenth-century transatlantic literary culture

Abstract

This thesis investigates how pairing the British poet John Keats and the American poet Emily Dickinson sheds new light on nineteenth-century transatlantic literary culture. Scholars have proven the fruitfulness enmeshed in nineteenth-century transatlantic literary culture. From a more specific perspective, they have attested to how the Anglo-American intellectual, literary, aesthetic, and cultural transmissions and exchanges characterize such culture. The illustration of the figurative encounters fostered between American and British writers is one of the most invested lenses illuminating this discourse. However, despite its richness, a more detailed examination, presented not just in a limited article-length format, of how a specific pair of American and British writers illuminates nineteenth-century Anglo-American literary culture deserves more critical attention. In response to this scholarly gap, this thesis elucidates how entangling Keats and Dickinson offers us more than one lens to approach the trajectory of nineteenth-century transatlantic literary relations. To perform such an entanglement, the overarching concern in my work is restoring and reassessing the less elucidated Keatsian and Dickinsonian transatlantic contexts, the overlooked contexts that characterize and are characterized by the pertinent Dickinson-Keats bonds, the more nuanced Keatsian contexts where Dickinson can be resituated, and the more innovative Dickinsonian contexts that revitalize Keats. This thesis further demonstrates that synthesizing different critical and theoretical accounts, to which this topic is related, facilitates a more rounded examination of this kind of manifold entanglement.

The first focus of my thesis is to instantiate the pairing of Keats and Dickinson through the former’s fluid legacies and afterlives in the latter. I establish a more specific Keatsian transatlantic context, the transatlantic transmission of his negative capability, of which the presence of such a concept in Dickinson is representative. My discussion, to which this premise is related, first testifies to how Keats’s and Dickinson’s shared approaches to the terminological definition of “Negative Capability” are reflected in their corresponding poetic tropes of darkness, light, sight, and vision. However, the transatlantic literary relations fostered between Keats and Dickinson, as my thesis intends to show, are not linear but reciprocal. I exemplify how the legacies of Keats’s negative capability in Dickinson renew our understanding of this concept, surfacing one layer of reciprocity in their literary relations. Moreover, scholars have widely acknowledged that Keats’s notion of negative capability anticipates the formulations of other Keatsian concepts. This premise prompts my further investigation of Dickinson’s rendering of the Keatsian principles encapsulated by his “poetical Character” in her poetic tropes of water images, widening the scope of what I consider the afterlives of Keats’s negative capability in Dickinson.

To further the synthetic approach this thesis adopts, I direct its second focus to elucidating a Dickinsonian transatlantic context in which her intertextuality with Keats is seen as paradigmatic. In this discourse, I single out the Anglo-American exchanges of the poetic tropes of birds as a promising route for investigation, pivoting on different perspectives from which we can approach Dickinson’s poetic birds in a transatlantic context metaphorically and intertextually. A key emphasis to fulfil such a goal is to re-evaluate Dickinson’s embedding of the contemporary cultural portrayal of birds in her poetry, eliciting the transatlantic traits seeded in her poetic birds. This re-evaluation solidifies my comparative reading of how such transatlantic traits prefigure her intertextual birdsongs with Keats. To unearth another layer of reciprocity in the Dickinson-Keats bonds, my account of their transatlantic intertextual birdsongs does not just focus on the Keats-to-Dickinson influence. It insinuates the less explored Dickinson-to-Keats influence by looking at how she speaks to, comments on, or revises her precursor birds. My overall discussion in this work also reflects the interconnectedness that lies in the theoretical frameworks developed by Mikhail Bakhtin, Harold Bloom, John Hollander, Gérard Genette, and Jessica Mason, reinforcing my more rounded examination of entangling Keats and Dickinson with nineteenth-century transatlantic literary culture, methodologically.