Watery Romanticism: Walking and Sailing West with Keats

¹ University College Cork.

Abstract

This article explores the meanings of John Keats’s short-lived trip across the Irish sea in the summer of 1818. His encounters with Scottish and Irish coasts were shaped by a rapidly changing travel infrastructure, including roads, bridges, and harbours. They also resulted in a remarkably vivid description of an impoverished Irish woman whose body and presence challenge romantic aesthetics while also calling up a more contingent, watery Romanticism.