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EDWARD SAID ARGUES IN CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM THAT "IDEAS SUGgesting, often ideologically implementing, imperial rule" dominate nineteenth century European art and literature.' This orientalist narrative, though acknowledged, is not seen as dominating the poetry or informing the poetics of Keats, a lack of emphasis that may be due to a later effect of an earlier marginalization of a "political" Keats. Jerome McGann has said, for instance, that the 1820 volume is a reactionary book in which Keats seeks to "dissolve social and political conflicts in the mediations of art and beauty" with "an eye to attracting the favorable attention of the public... and to allay conflict" that had greeted his earlier work.2 In a similar way, Keats is marginalized in relation to imperialism. Nigel Leask suggests Keats's limited presence in a political discourse of empire when he writes that politics and ideology have informed many current readings of the romantics, "even Keats."' In "Endymion," Leask writes, Keats's "orientalism is primarily a question of style, an imperial heraldry uncomplicated by the anxiety of empire" (125). Developing a closer tie between Keats and a complicity with imperialism, Debbie Lee views Keats as appropriating traces of African Voodoo and its social configurations in slave culture "to celebrate the poetic imagination through the magic and mystery of Africa," thus exercising "his colonial prerogative to possess and dispossess" that particular history.4 But it might be argued that Keats's "zombification," Lee's term for his death-in-life type wakefulness (14), is an echo of McGann's apolitical dead zone found in the silence of the Grecian Urn. Keats, in so far as he is seen as creator and consumer of such orientalist constructions, is thus viewed as distancing himself from or, at most, aestheticizing the realities of oppression and victimization. When Keats is seen as subversive, his poetic practices serve to reinforce his marginal status in relation to the paternal forces structuring language: he subverts by displaying his lack. Marjorie Levinson argues that Keats's use of popular works (or, were it a focus of her study, orientalist paraphernalia) consisting of travel books, dictionaries, illustrated encyclopedias and translations of classical works, signals vulgar or "bad access" to the forces that shape and dominate society.' Because Keats is seen as a person whose experience, in Paul...