14 - Keats and the complexities of gender

Summary

From his own day to ours, Keats - as a poet and as a person - has provoked questions about gender, about what it means to be a male or a female poet, about the nature of masculinity and femininity. Hazlitt first raised this issue in 1822, in his essay “On Effeminacy of Character.” Defining “effeminacy” as “a prevalence of the sensibility over the will,” “a want of fortitude,” a desire for “ease and indolence,” and an obsession with the sensations of the moment - as opposed to a “manly firmness and decision of character” - Hazlitt then suggested that there was a corresponding literary style, citing Keats's poetry as a primary example: “all florid, all fine; that cloys by its sweetness.” He concluded,

I cannot help thinking that the fault of Mr. Keats’s poems was a deficiency in masculine energy of style. He had beauty, tenderness, delicacy, in an uncommon degree, but there was a want of strength and substance. His Endymion is a very delightful description of the illusions of a youthful imagination, given up to airy dreams – we have flowers, clouds, rainbows, moonlight, all sweet sounds and smells, and Oreads and Dryads flitting by – but there is nothing tangible in it, nothing marked or palpable – we have none of the hardy spirit or rigid forms of antiquity.[. . .] We see in him the youth, without the manhood of poetry.

Numerous contemporary reviewers agreed that Keats’s poetry was effeminate, juvenile, or puerile. Writing for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in August 1818, “Z.” first defined Keats as a “Cockney” poet (vol. 3, 519), slang for an inferior, lower-class Londoner, with connotations of immaturity and effeminacy. It became his theme. In Blackwood’s January 1826 he was still describing Keats as an “infatuated bardling” who wrote “a species of emasculated pruriency that [. . .] looks as if it were the product of some imaginative Eunuch’s muse” (vol. 19, xvi, xxvi).