Keats, Hermeticism, and the Secret Societies (The Nineteenth by Jennifer N. Wunder

By Jennifer N. Wunder

Jennifer Wunder makes a powerful case for the significance of hermeticism and the key societies to an knowing of John Keats's poetry and his speculations approximately spiritual and philosophical questions. even though mystery societies exercised huge, immense cultural impression through the past due eighteenth and early 19th centuries, they've got acquired little cognizance from Romantic students. And but, information regarding the societies permeated all features of Romantic tradition. teams equivalent to the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons involved the studying public, and the industry was once flooded with articles, pamphlets, and books that mentioned the societies's objectives and airtight philosophies, debated their effect, and drew on their mythologies for literary inspiration.Wunder recovers the typical wisdom in regards to the societies and gives readers a primary examine the position they performed within the writings of Romantic authors normally and Keats specifically. She argues that Keats used to be conscious of the knowledge on hand in regards to the mystery societies and hired airtight terminology and imagery linked to those teams all through his profession. As she strains the impression of those mystery societies on Keats's poetry and letters, she not just bargains readers a brand new viewpoint on Keats's writings but additionally on scholarship treating his non secular and philosophical beliefs.While students have tended both to contemplate Keats's aesthetic and spiritual speculations on their lonesome phrases or to undertake a extra ancient procedure that rejects an emphasis at the religious for a materialist interpretation, Wunder bargains us a center manner. Restoring Keats to a milieu characterised by way of concurrently worldly and mythological propensities, she is helping to provide an explanation for if now not totally reconcile the insights of either camps.

Show description

Read Online or Download Keats, Hermeticism, and the Secret Societies (The Nineteenth Century) PDF

Best african books

The City on the Hill From Below: The Crisis of Prophetic Black Politics

In the self-discipline of yank political technology and the sector of political conception, African American prophetic political critique as a kind of political theorizing has been principally missed. Stephen Marshall, within the urban at the Hill from less than, interrogates the political considered David Walker, Frederick Douglass, W.

Nations Divided: American Jews and the Struggle over Apartheid

A pioneering research of yankee Jewish involvement within the struggle opposed to racial injustice in South Africa.

History, Trauma, and Healing in Postcolonial Narratives: Reconstructing Identities

What would it not suggest to learn postcolonial writings less than the prism of trauma? Ogaga Ifowodo tackles those questions via a psycho-social exam of the lingering effect of imperialist domination, leading to a clean supplement to the cultural-materialist reviews that dominate the sphere.

Proclaiming Political Pluralism: Churches and Political Transitions in Africa

Because the inhabitants of Africa more and more converts to Christianity, the church has stepped up its involvement in secular affairs revolving round the transition to democracy in international locations equivalent to Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. Comparative in method, the writer analyzes styles of church-state kin in a number of sub-Saharan international locations, and contends that church buildings develop into extra energetic and politically well known whilst components and companies of civil society are repressed via political elements or governing our bodies, supplying providers to take care of the overall healthiness of civil society within the absence of these organisations being repressed.

Additional resources for Keats, Hermeticism, and the Secret Societies (The Nineteenth Century)

Sample text

Buhle’s 1804 essay written in Latin. They appeared in the January, February, March and June editions of London Magazine. Thomas De Quincey, “Historico-Critical Inquiry into the Origins of the Rosicrucians and the Free-Masons,” De Quincey’s Collected Writings: Tales and Prose Phantasies, ed. David Masson, vol. 13 (Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1890) 384–448. 24 De Quincey 420–21 and 426, respectively. 32 Keats, Hermeticism, and the Secret Societies that revealed Masonic initiation rituals appeared throughout the period, most ran to multiple editions, and some were reissued year after year for decades.

The original quote may be found in Michel Brenet’s Francs-Maçons Parisiens du Grand-Orient de France (fin du XVIII siecle) 308. 30 De Quincey 423. 31 Jachin and Boaz reprinted by A. C. F. Jackson in English Masonic Exposures 1760–1769 (London: Lewis Masonic, 1986) 165–66. 32 Piatigorsky 305. 33 Piatigorsky 306. 34 Linden 8. 34 Keats, Hermeticism, and the Secret Societies also sought after by the Masons and described in similar terms. 35 Masonic goals and philosophies were often bound to those of Mystery societies, including the Eleusinian and Pythagorean, as authors grouped them together and various degrees claimed to offer a means to work towards the quintessence.

56 Keats, Letters II 103. This page intentionally left blank Chapter One Historical Hermeticism and the Secret Societies The number of avenues by which Keats could have been exposed to hermeticism is higher than many suspect, and this is true even if we take only the general atmosphere of the period into account. Roughly thirty years ago, M. H. 1 Abrams argued that the heavy emphasis during the Enlightenment upon a mechanistic and analytic worldview had resulted in a divided perspective that disallowed the hermetic vitalism of the Renaissance.

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.17 of 5 – based on 38 votes