Keats, Shelley, and the Eroticization of “Object Anxiety”

Using Hegel’s notion of the lyric poet’s capacity to manifest subjectivity by absorbing their own material conditions, this essay explores the relationship between poetic “subjects” and their “objects” of address in the work of John Keats and P. B. Shelley. According to Hegel, the lyric poet seeks to fully internalize external circumstances and objects of desire, yet many moments in Keats’s and Shelley’s works depict a deliberate failure of this assimilation, creating a distinctive form of masochistic eroticism. The greater desire there is to absorb an external entity, the greater the strangely pleasurable frustrations of our will become when this entity asserts its own agency. This can be seen most clearly in both Keats’s and Shelley’s late love lyrics, though this essay identifies moments throughout both poets’ œuvres which stage similarly ambivalent oscillations between assimilation and capitulation.