Skip to main content

Keats’s ‘Natural Sculptures’: Geology, Vitality and the Scottish Walking Tour

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Keats's Places
  • 193 Accesses

Abstract

Alexandra Paterson’s chapter takes a key phrase from Hyperion, ‘natural sculpture’, as a basis from which to explore the connections among geology, sculpture and human bodies in Keats’s poetry. Her argument is that Keats’s poetic depictions of sculptures and Hyperion’s fallen Titans are more profoundly influenced by the poet’s geological observations in various places, including the British Museum and geological sites visited during the northern walking tour, than has been hitherto acknowledged. Paterson brings material aspects of these sites—marble and rock—into animating contact with Keats’s Hyperion fragments.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 99.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 139.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Works Cited

  • Aamodt, Terrie, ‘Escape from ‘Slow-Time’: Sculpture and Tactile Temporality in Keats’s Later Poems’, Topic, 46 (1996): 45–56.

    Google Scholar 

  • Allard, James Robert, Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet’s Body (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).

    Google Scholar 

  • Aske, Martin, Keats and Hellenism: An Essay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

    Google Scholar 

  • Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de, Buffon’s Natural History, 10 vols, Barr’s Buffon (London: H. D. Symonds, 1807–1815).

    Google Scholar 

  • Byron, George Gordon, Lord, The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

    Google Scholar 

  • De Almeida, Hermione, Romantic Medicine and John Keats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

    Google Scholar 

  • Esterhammer, Angela, ‘Translating the Elgin Marbles: Byron, Hemans, Keats’, Wordsworth Circle, 40 (2009): 29–36.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gidal, Eric, Poetic Exhibitions: Romantic Aesthetics and the Pleasures of the British Museum (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001).

    Google Scholar 

  • Gittings, Robert, John Keats (London: Heinemann, 1968).

    Google Scholar 

  • Goellnicht, Donald C., The Poet-Physician: Keats and Medical Science (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984).

    Google Scholar 

  • Goslee, Nancy M., Uriel’s Eye: Miltonic Stationing and Statuary in Blake, Keats, and Shelley (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985).

    Google Scholar 

  • Haley, Bruce, Living Forms: Romantics and the Monumental Figure (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).

    Google Scholar 

  • Halpern, Nick, ‘Mist and Crag: The Poetry of Keats’s Walking Tour’, Topic, 46 (1996): 13–24.

    Google Scholar 

  • Haydon, Benjamin Robert, Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786–1846), ed. Tom Taylor, 2 vols (London: Peter Davies, 1926).

    Google Scholar 

  • Hazlitt, William, Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–1934).

    Google Scholar 

  • Heringman, Noah, ‘“Stones so Wonderous Cheap”’, Studies in Romanticism, 37 (1998): 43–62.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hirst, Wolf Z., ‘How Dreams Become Poems: Keats’s Imagined Sculpture and Re-Vision of Epic’, in The Romantic Imagination: Literature and Art in England and Germany, ed. Frederick Burwick and Jürgen Klein, Studies in Comparative Literature: 6 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), pp. 301–14.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hutton, James, Theory of the Earth: With Proofs and Illustrations. In Four Parts, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Cadell and Davies, 1795).

    Google Scholar 

  • Jack, Ian, Keats and the Mirror of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).

    Google Scholar 

  • Keats, John, Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).

    Google Scholar 

  • ———, The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958).

    Google Scholar 

  • Kelley, Theresa M., ‘Keats, Ekphrasis, and History’, in Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 212–37.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pearce, Alison, ‘“Magnificent Mutilations”: John Keats and the Romantic Fragment’, Keats-Shelley Review, 21 (2007): 22–34.

    Google Scholar 

  • Phinney, A. W., ‘Keats in the Museum: Between Aesthetics and History’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 90 (1991): 208–29.

    Google Scholar 

  • Roe, Nicholas, John Keats: A New Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).

    Google Scholar 

  • Rothenberg, Jacob, ‘Descensus ad Terram’: The Acquistion and Reception of the Elgin Marbles (New York, NY: Garland, 1977).

    Google Scholar 

  • Rovee, Christopher, ‘Trashing Keats’, English Literary History, 75 (2008): 993–1022.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ruston, Sharon, Shelley and Vitality (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005).

    Google Scholar 

  • Scott, Grant, ‘Beautiful Ruins: The Elgin Marbles Sonnet in Its Historical and Generic Contexts’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 39 (1990): 123–50.

    Google Scholar 

  • St. Clair, William, Lord Elgin and the Marbles: The Controversial History of the Parthenon Sculptures, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

    Google Scholar 

  • Stillinger, Jack, The Hoodwinking of Madeline and Other Essays on Keats’s Poems (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971).

    Google Scholar 

  • Traveller’s Guide Through Scotland, and Its Islands, 7th edn, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Thomson, 1818).

    Google Scholar 

  • Wood, Gillen D’Arcy, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture 1760–1860 (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

    Google Scholar 

  • Wordsworth, William, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Heidi Thomson, Robert Markley and Matthew Ward for their valuable input on drafts of this chapter.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alexandra Paterson .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Paterson, A. (2018). Keats’s ‘Natural Sculptures’: Geology, Vitality and the Scottish Walking Tour. In: Marggraf Turley, R. (eds) Keats's Places. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92243-0_9

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics