Stephanie Codsi, Review of Gregory Tate’s “Keats, Myth, and the Science of Sympathy.”

摘要

Gregory Tate’s “Keats, Myth, and the Science of Sympathy” is a highly engaging pieceof writing. The article’s central premise is that Keats’s poetry (particularly from 1817to 1819) uses myth, particularly the abstractness of apostrophe, to mediate a “restrainedform of sympathy” in his poetry. Such a model of sympathy, Tate claims, is influencedby Keats’s medical background and tutelage under the surgeon Astley Cooper and TheHospital Pupil’s Guide (1816), which is characterised by “benevolence” tempered byan objectifying “insusceptibility” to the patient’s pain (193). This attitude was advisedto medical students to ensure “accurate diagnosis”: an overactive sympathy was deemedto be detrimental to effective treatment. Taking “Ode to Psyche” as a case study, Tateshows how Keats’s speaker enacts – particularly through the form of the ode – a“dialectic, seeking to synthesise intersubjective feeling and scientific impartiality”(193), just as Cooper and the Guide propounded. Tate suggests that, to Keats, both“myth and medicine are modes of knowledge which balance the observation ofempirical evidence with subjective sensibility, and which also provide a set of generalprinciples, a theory, to underpin that balance” (193).