Necro-Aesthetic Creation in Keats’s Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil

This study examines John Keats’s “Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil” through the theoretical lens of necro-aesthetics, demonstrating how the poem presents the transformation of necropolitical violence into artistic production. Drawing on the theories of necropolitics, as proposed by Achille Mbembe, as well as the description of necropolitics as a regime of sensation developed in The Aesthetics of Necropolitics and Christina Sharpe’s “wake work” as a form of living with the dead, the study argues how Isabella’s grieving becomes mourning-as-making, in which tending to the dead emerges as sustained artistic labour rather than pathological fixation. The brothers’ act of murdering Lorenzo illustrates necropolitical sovereignty where life becomes disposable based on an economy that values class, use-value, and futurity. Isabella’s act resists this because she turns life into form by unearthing Lorenzo’s severed head and placing it in a basil pot to grow it as a living aesthetic object that embodies life through intimacy achieved through material and semiotic engagements. As she stops engaging with society temporally, this act is perceived not as negation but as concentration that corresponds to Sharpe’s notion of wake work. The article further argues that this necro-aesthetic practice is disrupted, almost brutally, through the theft of the basil pot by the brothers, who commit a second necropolitical violence, this time not just on the dead but also on the aesthetic that facilitates sustaining. Ultimately, Isabella’s demise shows that the ethical premise in this poem is that evil lies not in death but in the forbiddance of artistic expressions in which the dead would be able to linger or be in some form present in life.