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COPYRIGHT 2003 Boston University
Thomas McFarland. The Masks of Keats: The Endeavour of a Poet. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi+244. $49.95.
William Butler Yeats maintained that a poet achieves mastery of his art only when he assumes a mask, a character not his own, and finds in a culture not his own a source of flesh ideas and imagery. Thomas McFarland argues here that John Keats became a great poet by employing two masks that enabled him not only to exploit two contemporary cultural fashions, medievalism and Hellenism, but to become a "new and radiant being" (2), untrammeled by the misfortunes and embarrassments of his personal life. The masks did not simply release poetic power in Keats; they augmented it, fostering artistic achievement of a kind he would not otherwise have been capable of.
The "Mask of Camelot" gave expression not only to Keats's fascination with medieval tales and artifacts but, more importantly, to erotic energy that was frustrated by the circumstances of his life. His greatest success in the medieval mode was "The Eve of St. Agnes," wherein the hero's sexual triumph "vindicate[s] the thwarted sexuality of the man John Keats" (27). The Mask of Hellas provided Keats with another compensatory strategy whereby he could escape from uncomfortable realities into the sunlit, golden world whose beauty and serenity suffuses much of his most distinctive poetry. Keats wore the Mask of Hellas more frequently...
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