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Keynote Lecture: Dr Merrilees Roberts (Queen Mary University of London), ‘Ye who can unwearied pass’: John Keats’s erotic spaces of fatigue

Followed by Q&A

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Jul 22, 2025 from 06:00 to 08:00 (Europe/Berlin / UTC200)

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‘Ye who can unwearied pass’: John Keats’s erotic spaces of fatigue
 
Keats’s depictions of pleasurable exhaustion and reverie, where ‘the heart aches’ with ‘drowsy numbness’, create liminal spaces between wakefulness and sleep, where sensation is suspended yet ‘will’ and volition can be contested and renewed. In dialogue with eighteenth-century medical thought, I use Peter Sloterdijk’s concept of an ‘erototope’ to analyse Keats’s languorous states, which probe the epistemological limits of the sensorium, as auto-erotic spaces of intimacy rather than states of bodily depletion. What emerges is that states of fatigue – a product of the wakeful, disturbed and insomniac aspects of sleep – can be read as more than an isolating collapse of meaningful relationality. They can create porous mental spaces which provide some degree of protection against the kind of importunate, object-oriented desire Lauren Berlant refers to as part of a ‘therapy culture’ where objects and desires can be fully ‘known’. Yet, even if this form of false self-coherence is avoided, the mind remains tormented by its own propensity to produce excessively aroused states in response to its objects of desire.
 
Keats’s medical training gave him knowledge of the system of ‘Brunonian’ medicine, which classified diseases according to states of overstimulation (sthenic) or under-stimulation (asthenic), proposing that illnesses resulted from either an excess or deficiency of excitability in the body, often casting the body as swinging quickly from one extreme to the other when too much pleasure and desire trigger ongoing states of exhaustion. Focusing primarily on The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, I argue that sustained states of such depletion and fatigue, being their own paradoxically rousing and arousing kind of physiological activation, are no barrier to the ambitions of Keatsian desire, even though they may become a barrier to its consummation. Keats thus provides an early critique of expectations regarding the work of the ‘imagination’ and the ambivalent role of the poet and the philosopher in creating cultures of extreme and restless striving.
 
Bio
Merrilees Roberts teaches Literature and Politics at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Shelley’s Poetics of Reticence: Shelley’s Shame (2020) as well as other articles on Romantic poetry, affect theory and philosophies of sympathy. Her current research interests lie in critical theory, erotic poetics and in intersections between literature and science. She was an organiser of ‘The Shelley Conference 2024, Posthumous Poems, Posthumous Collaborations’, Keats House, Hampstead, London and is a member of the steering committee for the Queen Mary Centre for the Study of the Nineteenth Century & its Legacies.