Volume V Special Issue IV October 2025

Name of Author : Dr Madhav Astik

Title of the paper : What Is There to Desire but Silence Substitution by Zero as an Aesthetic and Philosophical Device in the Poetry of John Keats

Abstract: In the canon of English Romantic poetry, John Keats stands apart as a poet who revels not merely in what can be expressed, but in what resists articulation. This study proposes a novel lens for interpreting Keatss poetic technique through the metaphor of Substitution by Zero a borrowed concept from mathematics reconfigured here to describe Keatss purposeful deployment of poetic silence, ellipsis, and rhetorical incompletion. In Keats’s oeuvre, silence is not emptiness, but a locus of sublimity, an aperture through which the ineffable enters the poetic frame. Drawing upon a close textual analysis of thirty major and minor poems, and structured around the theoretical insights of Negative Capability, deconstructive différance, and reader response aesthetics, this paper investigates how Keats strategically suspends closure and withholds semantic certainty. It demonstrates that such moments of intentional omission deepen the emotional resonance of themes like death, beauty, time, desire, and the sublime. Furthermore, the paper includes a quantitative overview of omission devices across poetic genres and themes, supported by visual aids and a frequency analysis. In doing so, it offers not only an interpretive model for reading Keats but also a broader theoretical framework for understanding the poetics of silence in Romantic literature.

Keywords : John Keats, Substitution by Zero, Poetics of silence, Negative Capability, Romantic poetry

DOI :

Page Number : 5-17