Carly Stevenson on Keats and Gothic botany

On 18 May 2018, Keats scholar Carly Stevenson (University of Sheffield) presented a talk on 'Keats and Gothic botany' at a special late-night opening of Keats House museum in Hampstead, London. For those unable to attend the evening (which also included guided tours, live music, and readings of the poems Keats wrote in 1818), we present here a short Q&A with Carly about the contents of her talk and her work on John Keats...In your talk, your considered that as a trained apothecary, 'Keats was keenly aware of the medicinal properties of plants and how they might be harnessed to heal… or harm'. Can you tell us more about Keats's use of botanical imagery in poems like Endymion,and how this connects with his fascination with the potentially morbid connotations of the natural world as he saw it?Keats was taught medical botany by William Salisbury at Guy's and would have visited Chelsea Physic Garden, where toxic plants grew alongside culinary herbs and common flowers (see: Hermione de Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats, p. 147-148). Keats conjures similar imagery in Book I of Endymion:  'blue hare-bells' (202) grow amongst 'night-swollen mushrooms' (215); bay leaves and frankincense crackle in the same 'fragrant pile' as 'smothering parsley' (228-230), which is likely a reference to Aethusa cynapium (otherwise known as 'fool's parsley' - a highly-poisonous relation of hemlock that omits an unpleasant odour when bruised) and 'unseen flowers' (235) appear 'In desolate places, where dank moisture breeds / The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth' (240-241). The text is a kind of botanical garden, where poisonous plants share the same soil as harmless herbs and wildflowers. The idea of cross-pollination suggests itself clearly here, which demonstrates how medical discourse intersects with the language of terror in Keats's writing and foreshadows his later preoccupation with the theme of contamination. In Keats’s poetry, the natural world is often a source of terror and wonder; we need only look to 'Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil' for an example of how the natural world (in this case, a basil plant) is reconfigured into something unnatural. Keats is particularly adept at conjuring a sense of the uncanny by presenting natural objects in a strange context: the engorged, phallic mushrooms in Endymion are all the more unsettling because they appear alongside innocuous flowers and herbs.You also discussed some of Keats's Gothic influences, such as Ann Radcliffe. Which Gothic legacies are you thinking about most in your doctoral research and beyond?My research is interested in how Keats interacts with texts that emerged during the long eighteenth century, when the Gothic came into being as literary genre. Keats’s relationship with the Gothic is a complex one that is fraught with anxieties about gender and class identity; the kind of criticism Keats received from publications such as Blackwood’s Magazine is strikingly similar to the backlash against the rise of popular Gothic literature in that both were considered low, vulgar and effeminate by the conservative press. In a similar manner to Coleridge's review of The Monk in 1797, Keats seems at once dismissive of the Gothic and in awe of it: 'you see what fine mother Radcliff names I have. It is not my fault; I did not search for them' he writes in a letter to George Keats and his family dated 14 February 1819, in which he refers to 'Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil', 'The Eve of St Agnes' and 'The Eve of St Mark'. These poems engage with Radcliffian conventions in a way that transcends parody and reveal his admiration for the Gothic mode, in spite of (or because of) its formulaic tendencies. In short, I am interested in the ways in which Keats responds to Gothic legacies (from Walpole, Radcliffe, Coleridge and so on). In other words, to what extent does Keats write within a Gothic tradition? How does he subvert, problematize, rework or critique aspects of the Gothic in his poetry?See more upcoming events at Keats House (including a June 2018 event in partnership with the Byron Society) here.