Abstract
In this paper, I enquire into the extent to which a coherent theoretical understanding of poetry may be extracted from Keats’s posthumously collated letters. I develop the idea that central to Keats’s approach is a very distinctive conception of a dialectic between literary “truth” and indeterminacy, and that this informs his intimation of an overall theoretical position which configures important philosophical questions pertaining to affectivity, the imagination, and inter-subjectivity as being ultimately constitutive of what it is to encounter a work of poetry. This serves to clarify the place of empathy in Keats’s meta-poetical thought.
Shumanities 