Dancing with Ghosts in ‘Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil’

This essay reads the intimacy between persons and things dramatized in Keats’s poem as a haunting that at once enacts and acts against normative states of being or orders of experience. Drawing on Hazlitt’s invocation of the past as “alive and stirring with objects” in conjunction with the political resonance of the ghost dance Gayatri Spivak summons in her response to Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, this reading aims to depathologize Isabella’s intense attachment to the pot of basil by reflecting on the potential for resistance or transformation within the practices of everyday life, including within the repetitions and returns that constitute our own everyday practices as readers of Keats’s poem.