This article examines John Keats's Lamia (1820) as a seminal text at the intersection of classical mythological revision and Romantic aesthetic ideology. Drawing upon Keats's engagement with Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Philostratus's Life of Apollonius of Tyana, and the broader tradition of Greek mythology, the poem stages a sustained meditation on the relationship between beauty and truth, illusion and reality, the supernatural and the human. Through close reading and contextual analysis, the article traces how Keats transforms the Greek serpent-woman archetype into a vehicle for exploring the Romantic preoccupation with the power and danger of the poetic imagination. The study further investigates how the poem's formal qualities — its couplet prosody, sensory imagery, and narrative ambiguity — enact the very aesthetic tensions it thematises. Finally, the article situates Lamia within the debates over the role of mythology in Romantic poetry, the gendered politics of the femme fatale, and the crisis of vision that defines Keats's mature verse.

Keywords: Keats, Lamia, Idyllic, mythology, femme fatale, negative capability, poetic imagination, Greek myth, alluring, narrative poetry.