Troubled Sea of the Mind: A Study of the Horror in the Select Poems of John Keats

Abstract

Horror is an “intense fear” that puts an individual’s emotions under threat creating “terror”, “disgust”, or “shock”. But horror as a genre captures the mind of the readers and audience with a sense of enjoyment. It is a releasing experience. It is “the physical and emotional release that follows scary situations”. And it is very close to “uncanny”, “terrible in nature that, according to Freud, “arouses dread and creeping horror”. The genealogy of horror as a literary genre can be traced back to ancient Greece and Rome. It was only in the late 18th and early 19th century when horror bloomed as the most successful literary genre. This paper on horror primarily tries to focus on select poems of Keats and presentation of horror in different sections of his poetic journey. A close reading of his poems not only offers the extraordinary capacity of thinking “on his pulses”, a highly loaded sensual Nature but also of a lurking trauma, creeping anxiety for death. In Keats, the beauty of nature has to be cherished with an uncertainty of existence. Certainly, Keats was influenced by Gothicism.