Keats's relationship with the orient: early ambivalence and developing control

Abstract

This paper has attempted to trace Keats's relationship with the Orient from his first entanglement with it up to his last. It finds that such a relationship responds to Keats's epistemology and its different changes. Under Keats's empirical epistemology, that depends for knowing the world on direct and sensory experience of its forms, the poet's relationship with the Orient suffers. The Orient's physical absence from the poet's sensory perceptive powers and its supernatural associations prevent the poet from experiencing it empirically. Consequently, Keats's dependence on the Orient during this early stage of his career is inhibited. It takes a radical change in Keats's epistemology to release the poet from his early inhibition. Such change occurs when Keats replaces his empirical epistemology with a transcendental one. The new direction depends for knowing the world on an imaginative creation of its forms and objects. Phenomenal presence and sensory experience become, under its rules, unnecessary. The poet succeeds, through this change, in envisioning and embracing the Orient. His literary dependence on it increases during the last stage of his career.