Adam Ross Rosenthal

Texas A&M University

arrosenthal@gmail.com

NASSR 2015: Romanticism & Rights

Sluttish Dreams and the Time of Anachronism in Keats
In the opening verse paragraph of The Fall of Hyperion Keats opposes two kinds of
dreams: Those that are inscribed on vellum and those that are not. Whereas for those dreamers
without the aid of the shadows of melodious utterance, they live, dream and die (6-7),
Poesy, Keats goes on, tell[s] her dreams, / With the fine spell of words alone can save /
Imagination from the sable charm / And dumb enchantment (8-11). At stake is the difference
between a seemingly finite life cyclelive, dream and dieand one of non-cyclical, or nonfinite nature, involving the weighty acts both of tell[ing] and sav[ing]. Keats fascination
with the temporality of reading, its lives or afterlives, is a constant preoccupation, re-emerging in
the fragment This living hand, now warm and capable and elsewhere. Yet what separates
Keats vision from mere reflections on the death of the authorhere at leastis its specifically
oneiric focus. For dreams may speak at once to the past, the present or the future. Indeed, what
makes a dream a dream is precisely its areferential, futural, or potentially indeterminate address.
Prior, then, even to the question of inscription, the dream bears with it an uncanny temporality
that disrupts referential interpretation and makes anachronism essential to any project of reading.
Inscription doubles downso to speakon the dreams anachronistic nature, by causing it to
live on, beyond the proper time of life, in what amounts in Keats verse to a deathless survival.
This paper approaches dreaming and inscription in Keats as two modes of uncanny or
anachronistic temporalities. It asks, moreover, how each introduces the problem of timeliness
into his writings, turning his verse at the same time into timely/untimely texts and reflections on
this conditioning temporal element. If Poesy for Keats is necessarily anachronistic, how does
this reinterpret or pose essential problems for the Western trope of poetic immortality as

Adam Ross Rosenthal

Texas A&M University
arrosenthal@gmail.com

timelessnessShakespeares famous rejection of sluttish time? Would not Keatsian

anachronism bear with it an essentially sluttish nature? How does Keats poetry speak to this
sluttishness and its importance for reading or survival?