Keats’s sense of family history: Isabella and the eve of St. Agnes

Abstract

Romantic impulses govern the fraught, family histories in these poems on conflicts that disrupt or threaten loss to lovers. In Isabella Keats explores a young woman’s resistance to her brothers’ machinations. In The Eve of St. Agnes Madeline confronts an uncertain future, either in her family’s bastion or in Porphyro’s domains. The attention to romantic energy in both poems discloses Keats’s entrance into the manners, attitudes, striking poses that dominate the participants in mercantile and feudal realms. To what these participants say and do, he contributes elements of dirge, musical instruments, furnishings, stark landscapes, and historic accounts of cruelties and exploitation.