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Burnett, Sara

English

2005

MA

This paper will demonstrate how conceptions of masculinity and femininity shape and are shaped by the Romantic poets, Keats and Wordsworth. While historical and current scholarship tends to feminize Keats and masculinize Wordsworth, I will argue in this paper that neither Keats nor Wordsworth completely identifies with a feminine or masculine poetic identity. While Wordsworth is masculine, he is not necessarily masculinist, and while Keats is not masculine, he can be masculinst. In the first chapter, I show that Keats's negative capability is a self-conscious attempt to imagine an androgynous poetic identity distinct from the gendered debate of his contemporaries. I will then explore how such a poetic ideal is paradoxically self-annihilating and that it relies upon a female figure to explore limiting notions of masculinity and femininity. In the second chapter, I will illustrate that Wordsworth's poetic identity is both masculine and feminine because of his productive relationships with real and fictional women. Persistent readings of the female figure as the victim reify her victimization and a masculinist aim to deny her any voice or agency. If Keats explores the boundaries of femininity and masculinity, Wordsworth explores the possibilities for a masculinity that is not always masculinist. Reading Keats first and then Wordsworth, this paper also questions the assumption of a self-originating Wordsworthian and masculinist identity that dominates the formation of the Romantic canon and much Romantic criticism. Less confining readings of gender in Romantic poetry broaden our understanding of how early and later Romantics conceived of masculinity and femininity not as fixed but as shifting in relation to each other. It challenges readers to think beyond limiting assumptions of masculine and feminine difference still propagated in contemporary criticism.