Conspiring with Keats: Toward a Poetics of Breathing
ABSTRACT This essay argues that Keats understood poetic performance as a conspiring, a powerfully somatic, often eroticized communion of poet and reader he figured as a process of mutual breathing. Owing to his personal history and medical expertise, Keats's attitude toward respiration was deeply ambivalent: if a precipitant of death, breathing the rhythmic conspiring through which poetic forms materialized in the bodies of readers during utterance could be curative, even afford the poet a secular, aesthetic version of immortality. His embodied, breath centered concept of reading and writing depended on a psychosomatic model of cognition that grounded intellectual activity in the life of the sensorium.