“Some Ghostly Queen of Spades”: John Keats’s Images of Spectrality

In the present paper I aim at exploring Keats’s use of Gothic and grotesque images in his three famous poems: “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil,” “The Eve of Saint Agnes” and the unfinished “The Eve of St. Mark.” I argue that there is a consistent pattern of imagery in Keats’s poetry that combines these two categories, and this imagery revolves around an idea of a spectral presence, or a “life-in-death” existence. The mingling of these two literary and aesthetic modes allows for a powerful articulation of anxieties relating to mortality, a confrontation with the inevitability of death and decay of the human body, and the uneasy, tentative hope for the afterlife.