Abstract:
A literary survey points out that spatiality - despite recent trends - does not receive
much attention in the study of Romanticism. This dissertation aims to fill this gap and
investigates the otherworldly realms that Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats
create in their poetry. The term otherworld is used to denote any space that is not
actuality and includes spaces like the pleasure-dome at Xanadu in "Kubla Khan" and
"the cold hill's side" in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci".
The specific focus is on the way the poets create these worlds. Despite several
similarities, the two poets' worlds differ in that Coleridge alludes to the transcendent and
emphasises mystery and the vastness of the universe. He does so by using images that
reveal only part of the otherworld created and by focusing attention on that which cannot
be perceived by the senses. In contrast, Keats's focus is on the particular, highlighting
the otherworldly within that which is known. He achieves a familiar unfamiliarity by
alluding strongly to the senses and revealing what he called the "truth" of the objects
contemplated in his poems.
The findings are based on a hermeneutic, biographical and historical approach rooted in
the two writers' prose.
