Cricticism In Lamia

Keats’s Sympathy with the Other in Lamia

In Lamia, Keats shows a very much greater sense of proportion and power of selection than in his earlier work. There is more light and shade. It is written in 1819 after going to Rome and learning about his illness. Just before he writes Lamia, he has a brain hemorrhage, so he knows he is dying. His brother has also just died, and his brother George is in financial difficulty. George steals from his mother and goes gambling much of the time. When George asks John for money, John has Lamia published to provide the money.

According to Porscha Fermanis, substantial cricticism on Lamia posits that the poem is observed that this poem is “concerned with money” (Fermanis, 2009, p. 99) and that “Keats’s own anxiety over money during the composition of Lamia resonates throughout the poem” (Kelvin Everest summarized in Fermains 99) but Keats represents his view about money in this way that it relays the large debate about the effects of trade and commerce on the social, economic and political

Related to the luxury motif is the nymph who is instrumental to the dramatization of the theme of temptation. However, Keats’ sympathy for her desire for humanity complicates the nymph’s role as the symbolic incarnation of luxury and excess. This chapter argues that Keats represents Lamia as the figure of the sensuous and the sensory as much as the example of sorrow and misery and that the description of her physicality merges with Keats’s sympathetic understanding of her predicament. Lamia is both a woman trapped in a serpent’s form and a serpent trapped in a woman’s physique. Keats deliberately portrays her as mysterious and vague. She is good and evil, inhuman and human, a lover and a destroyer. She is associated both with the demon and the innocent maiden. She represents the Other towards whom Keats slants the readers’