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The Failed Reader: Keats’s “Brain-Sick” Endymion
- Philosophy and Literature
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 36, Number 1, April 2012
- pp. 96-110
- 10.1353/phl.2012.0015
- Article
- Additional Information
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John Keats’s subject in Endymion is the imagination operating on the failed reader: the neutral or adolescent intellect that ultimately denies the transcendence it experiences; failing to mature, willfully remaining adolescent. Keats’s presentation of Endymion as “brain-sick” in this respect is thus a radical reinvention of the perpetually youthful Endymion in the Greek myth. Keats is keenly aware, moreover, of the built-in failure of his poem, a failure that remains true today; he cannot make readers recognize Endymion’s adolescent intellect as adolescent, much less recognize it as their own failed thinking.