Keats and the Science of Sensation: A Proto-Neuroscientific Reading of the Romantic Imagination
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.67431/gyacvg72Keywords:
John Keats; Romantic medicine; proto-neuroscience; embodied cognition; sensation; neuroaesthetics; neuroplasticity.Abstract
This article reads John Keats through the combined lenses of Romantic medicine and proto-neuroscience, arguing that his imagination operates as an embodied cognitive process. Grounded in his medical apprenticeship at Guy’s Hospital, Keats’s poetry reveals an acute awareness of sensation, pain, and pleasure as physiological events that generate aesthetic insight. Close analyses of Ode to Psyche, Ode on Melancholy, Ode to a Nightingale, and selected letters show how Keats constructs the body as the primary site of imaginative and emotional knowledge. By situating his work within early nineteenth-century debates on vitality, materialism, and the nervous system — and placing his ideas in dialogue with contemporary neuroscience — the article positions Keats as a proto-neuroscientific thinker whose poetics anticipate modern theories of embodied cognition, neuroplasticity, and distributed subjectivity.
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