Food in Nineteenth-Century Literature | Helen B. Ellis (essay date 1980)
Helen B. Ellis (essay date 1980)
SOURCE: Ellis, Helen B. “Food, Sex, Death, and the Feminine Principle in Keats's Poetry.” English Studies in Canada, 6, no. 1 (spring 1980): 56-74.
[In the following essay, Ellis discusses the pervasive association between feasting and sexual fulfillment in Keats's poetry.]
In his perceptive discussion of Keats's letters, Lionel Trilling notes the pervasiveness of ingestive imagery used by Keats, and also the ambivalence many readers feel toward such imagery:
It is surely possible to understand what led Yeats to speak of Keats as a boy with his face pressed to the window of a sweetshop. The mild and not unsympathetic derogation of Yeats's image suggests something of the reason for the negative part of our ambivalence towards eating and drinking. The ingestive appetite is the most primitive of our appetites, the sole appetite of our infant state, and a preoccupation with it, an...
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