John Keats and the Memory of Poetry: A Survey of "Texts" and "Traces"

Memory and recollections are central to John Keats’s reflection on poetry and the poetic process. Albeit evidently indebted to William Wordsworth, Keats progressively questions the role of subjective remembrance in poetic creation. After suggesting that Keats’s concept of “recollections” largely coincides with the memory of literary tradition, this article argues that his works and letters offer a number of elements that should be discussed against the backdrop of memory studies. On the one hand, his walking tour of Scotland in 1818 resulted in the celebration of poetic “lieux de mémoire”, sites embodying the tradition that he was hoping to recover and contribute to. On the other hand, Keats’s poems and correspondence offer ample evidence of his concern with the posthumous reception of his work and, by extension, his presence in cultural memory.