Musing in Keats’s Presence: Reflections on the 2024 Keats Conference

by Vivien Chan, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

The Keats Conference 2024 was held on 17th-19th May at its customary location—the Keats House in London. This year’s conference was, as always, a collaborative effort, generously hosted by the Keats Foundation and driven by the unwavering devotion of Keatsian scholars and aficionados who return year after year.

Just a stone’s throw from the mulberry tree, where Keats composed his “Ode to a Nightingale”, stands the simple yet elegant Regency-style Keats House—the sanctum of the poet’s heart, bathed in the same warm sunlight of May two centuries after his death. Inside the house, in the cozy, timber-paneled Nightingale Room, twenty-five presenters and three speakers gave their papers on the theme “Prospects and Retrospections”. Throughout the conference, scholars delved into the landscape of epistolary rediscoveries, rebranded Keats’s posthumous image and legacy, traced the echoes of his poetic soundscapes, and navigated the ongoing waves of editorial and critical re-imaginings of his body of work.

One of the many highlights of this intellectually stimulating yet incredibly welcoming conference was the keynote lecture delivered by Professor Jonathan Mulrooney from the College of the Holy Cross. The lecture, with a laconic title, “Keats’s Futures”, beckoned us to revisit Endymion as a poetic intervention vindicating a much-needed theory of “open-reading” at our moment in literary history, where our pedagogical practices are rendered more challenging than ever due to the political, historical, and emotional fatigue of our time. Viewed under this light, the poem’s much-faulted generic variousness, affected use of rhymes and imagery, and involuted structure all work together to orchestrate an interpretive openness that remains resistant to and unfettered by historicist criticism, past or present. Keats’s open reading, as Professor Mulrooney carefully illustrated in his lecture, was primarily seen as a threat to the traditional masculine reading practices of the poet’s time. The fluid, ‘leaky’ openness of Keats’s non-teleological poetic practice was, in the eyes of Tory reviewers like Lockhart and Croker, sexually charged, gendered female, and encouraging readers to read with a dangerous sympathy. Indeed, to borrow Anne Mellor’s words, Keats “locates poetic creation in the realm of the feminine”, defining the poet, as well as the reader, as one who “possesses a self with permeable ego boundaries that exists only in its relations with others”.[1]

This is precisely the kind of sympathy that reading Endymion, the labyrinthine romance, both advocates and requires—to read is to read with, in the speaker’s own words, “unclosable desires”, receptive to the uncertain imaginative outcomes that the text has to offer. At this point, this idea of reading in and with contingency aligns nicely with another keynote speaker, Professor Andrew Bennett, who spoke about narrative contingency in Keats’s epistolary poetics, where, in his private correspondence, distance and desire are regulated through literary mediation in a way self-consciously contingent upon the recipient. The Keatsian practice of “open-reading”, or “open-writing” for that matter, is a touchstone for us, as it offers a new, affective, open-ended way of engaging with literature. Under this practice, the text is treated as an object of curiosity: partial, contingent, fleeting, yet repeatable, as Professor Mulrooney so beautifully described. This is the future of Keats in the pedagogical realm, where Romantic reading shall be an occasion for readerly affects that may one day, again in the speaker’ words, culminate as historical effects in students’ lived experience, as poetry-reading continues to find its way to become a vital and repeatable part of their lives.

The second day concluded with dinner at The Garden Gate near the Keats House. The affable conversations among panelists and audience members continued throughout the evening, as we tipsily “mused”, “prophesied” upon, and “wandered with” the Keatsian spirit in the long Romantic history while enjoying the convivial vibes and delectable food at the pub.[2] The unpredictability and open-endedness of Keats’s writings are exactly what render him a prescient and productive presence in Romantic literature. Whether we are interested in the philosophical vibrancy of his prose, the visual artillery of his poetry, or the intertextual dialogues between him and many that came before and after, his work demonstrates that the heart’s affections must be the foundation of the poet’s or reader’s imagination. That is why he remains an endearing and resonant presence in our hearts, drawing us back to gather under the same mulberry tree year after year from all around the world.

Notes

[1] Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender, (Oxford: Routledge, 1993), 175.

[2] John Keats, The Letters of John Keats: 1814-1821, vol. 1, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 231.

About the Author

Vivien Chan is a doctoral student at the Department of English, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where she has also received an MPhil in English Literary Studies. She has been a participant in the Keats Conference twice (2023 and 2024), presenting on topics related to the sensing body and Keats’s poetry. Her current doctoral research project focuses on John Keats, embodiment and the sympathetic imagination, exploring the embodied parameters of Keats’s chameleonic poetic selfhood. Her wider research interests include British Romanticism, cognitive empathy and pain studies.