Keats and Scepticism

<p><em>Keats and Scepticism</em> explores Keats’s affinity with the philosophical tradition of scepticism and reads Keats’s poetry anew in the light of this affinity. It suggests Keats’s links with the origin of scepticism in ancient Greece as recorded in Sextus Empiricus’s <i>Outlines of Scepticism</i>. It also discusses Keats’s connections with Montaigne the most important Renaissance inheritor of Pyrrhonian scepticism; Voltaire the Enlightenment <i>philosophe</i> whose sceptical ideas made an indelible impact on Keats; and Hume the most thoroughgoing sceptic after antiquity. Other than Keats’s affinitive ideas with these sceptical thinkers this book is particularly interested in Keats’s experiments with the peculiar language forms modes and genres of poetry to convey the non-dogmatic philosophy. In this light it re-reads <i>Isabella</i> ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ the 1819 odes the two <i>Hyperion</i>s <i>King Stephen</i> and <i>Lamia</i> all of which reveal Keats’s self-reflexive and radical sceptical poetics in challenging poetic dogmas and conventions. </p><p>This book is for Keats lovers students teachers scholars or non-academic readers who are interested in Romanticism nineteenth-century studies or poetry and philosophy in general. This original accessible interdisciplinary study aims to offer the reader a fresh perspective to read Keats and appreciate the quintessential Keatsian poetics.</p>