La Belle Dame sans Merci

“Performative Femininity and Female Invalidism in John Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’” by Ana G. Gal (2016)

Gal’s essay—included in Gender and the Vampire Narrative, Sense Books, 2016—provides a feminist analysis of “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” Gal, a Romantic-literature expert, explores the figure of the femme fatale in romantic poems as a variation of the proverbial vampiric woman who preys on men. She argues that Keats’s portrayal of the lady in “La Belle” is problematic.

“Why John Keats is not a Romantic” by David B. Gosselin (2018)

In his blog, The Chained Muse, poet and linguist Gosselin makes the radical case that Keats should not be placed in the Romantic tradition. According to Gosselin,

Romantic poetry largely concerned itself with describing and idealizing the sensual world and its myriad images. However, Keats thought in precisely the opposite manner: the sensual world was a realm of paradoxes, an entry-point through which to confront and wrestle with the greatest questions of the human experience.

The essay offers a useful and thought-provoking alternative reading of Keats.

“Why Keats’s haunting reflections on tuberculosis resonate in the age of Covid-19” by Michael Barrett (2021)

Writing for The New Statesman, Barrett, a professor of biochemical parasitology, examines Keats’s poems in light of the poet’s deep-rooted fear of the tuberculosis pandemic. Barrett illustrates how illness informs many of the metaphors and symbols in “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and paints a vivid, relatable picture of the disease for the contemporary reader.