“My Heart Aches,” Therefore I Am: “Ode to a Nightingale” as Keats’s Romantic Experimentation with Language = “My Heart Aches,” Therefore I Am: “Ode to a Nightingale” as Keats’s Romantic Experimentation with Language

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This essay examines John Keats’s interrogation of the possibilities as well as limitations of poetic language to liberate human consciousness from the confines of the ego and provide an enlarged understanding of the pain of human existence in “Ode to a Nightingale.” In exploring Keats’s experimental use of poetic language in the ode, the essay situates Keatsian language in the context of Romantic philosophy of language developed by contemporary German and British Romanticists. Greatly influenced by Kantian epistemology, Romantic philosophy of language recognizes the constitutive role of language in a language user’s cognition of the self as well as the self’s relation to the world. Drawing on Keats’s concept of negative capability, which emphasizes the importance of actively resisting our propensity for logical and systematized knowledge of the world built on a clear distinction between subject and object, this essay contends that Keats’s poetic experimentation in the ode complicates and challenges the Romantic theory of language. Specifically, by grounding his cogito in the reality of his heartache, which is of both endogenous and external origin, Keats undermines one of the main premises of the Romantic performative that understands the identity of the I fundamentally as a linguistic construct. In positing his heartache, which is neither provable nor disprovable by others, as the basis of the affirmation of his existence, Keats both acknowledges contemporary Romanticists’ insight into the performative role of language in the construction of subjectivity and rejects their belief in the impossibility of attaining knowledge of the I as substance. Though the speaker’s return to his self in the last stanza of the ode suggests that Keats’s battle with the autonomy of language to posit existence is far from won, the ode has successfully created the condition for exercising negative capability and obtaining a glimpse of “a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery.”