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Decapitating Romance: Class, Fetish, And Ideology In Keats’S Isabella, Diane Hoeveler

English Faculty Research and Publications

Critics of Keats's Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil (1818) traditionally focus on the poem's "transitional" status between the early Endymion and the later and much greater odes. This article reads the poem as a shocking and angry poem by interrogating the meanings of the decapitated head that lies at the core of the text. By interrogating the head I read the work as an expression of Keats's attempt to bury his grief for his parents' deaths, to repudiate his middle-class origins, and to deny his attraction to "Romance," the popular Gothic ballad tradition of his day. The text explores …