THE ACTIVE AND VEXED DELIBERATIONS OF KEATS'S POETRY--ITS VERY "thinking"--on the topic of human identity remain some of Romanticism's most incisive and expansive reflections on the constitution of selfhood. Keats's verse thinks through questions about human subjectivity and its horizons and limits in the world with an immense imaginative range, and his meditations on selfhood are often made all the more poignant and interesting by their at times startling untimeliness. Whereas most Romantics insist, in one way or another, on the priority of the self in relation to objects and in relation to the world, Keats famously asserts that the poetical character has "no identity" and allows his characters and speakers to dissolve into or be absorbed by other beings. From the early experiments to the Spring Odes, Keats's poems are populated by selves that are empty and have been hollowed out by the chameleon poet, selves that have dissipated and have come to fill out and think themselves into other bodies. Then again, the poems just as frequently are occupied with selves intensely saturated with emotion or overcome by personal feeling, strong selves full of, for example, heartache, desire, beauty, or joy. Similarly, Keats's poetic persona can at times surface in his verse as "dispossessed" or even acutely "disappointed" with itself--again, empty and vacant--but that persona can also come forward as vital, energetic, effusive, and abundant) Readers of Keats have claimed that his verse is constitutively bound to a logic of the self's internalization and--with equal conviction--they have argued that Keats offers a critique of the self's autonomy and independence in the world. (2) Rarely has attention been given to the very breadth of literary thinking that constitutes Keats's active struggles with questions of subjectivity, human identity, and their forms of aesthetic voicing and articulation. Whether they emerge as rich and full or come forward as hollow and empty vessels, the selves in Keats's poetry always reach beyond their own identities. They stand for or are more than themselves. Keats's speakers, characters, and figures find that their "selves" are the openings to a precisely social, shared, and common experience. They find that their very souls (as Stanley Cavell might put it) are essentially impersonal. (3) Their sense of self stretches out and extends beyond the particular and the personal (beyond the "sole self," one's discrete and distinguishable identity), and the pursuit of the self and self-knowledge therefore becomes in Keats's verse a pursuit and knowledge of others and of the world. The self in Keats's verse is more than itself, and its voice thus takes on an exemplarity, a political "standing for" or even "speaking for" others voiced within and made possible by a necessarily impersonal register of poetic expression. Keats's voice is more than his own.
