This essay examines the role of shape, space, and geometrical imagination in the poetry of John Keats, arguing that his work is deeply informed by contemporary visual culture and emergent modes of spatial thinking. It begins with the striking material contiguity in Keats's April 1819 journal letter between the draft of ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and his account of visiting Henry Barker's Leicester Square Rotunda to view a panoramic representation of John Franklin's Arctic voyage. I suggest that the immersive, cylindrical spatial logic of the panorama actively shapes the ballad's circular form and uncanny looping return to the lakeside margin. The essay then broadens its scope to explore how geometric projection and non-Euclidean spatial dynamics operate in The Eve of St Agnes and Lamia. From the projection of stained-glass light onto Madeline's body to Lamia's topologically ambiguous transformations and impossible townhouse architecture, Keats's poetry – self-referential, resistant to closure – engages with the emergence in the early nineteenth century of a newly ‘unconstrained' geometrical imagination, anticipating topological modes of thought formalized later in the century.
RICHARD MARGGRAF-TURLEY (Wed,) studied this question.