A revaluation of the poet's works reveals his critical feelings towards the literature, sexuality, religion and politics of his time as well as his uncertainties as a second generation Romantic.

Endymion is the trâit d'union between Keats’s juvenilia and his better known, and conventionally more mature, works. By its nature, it is a transitional work, and thus gives the scholar special insight into the development of Keats’s poetics and idiom. Moreover, Endymion is the Keatsian work which most rattled and provoked critics of its time. This book reconstructs the linguistic context of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries in order to explain the reviewers’ unease with regard to Endymion. It shows that eighteenth-century prescriptivism arose from a deep-seated anxiety of language, Lockean in origin, and that the ensuing desire to stabilize and therefore control language informed Romantic criticism in general, and the criticism of Keats’s work in particular, more fundamentally than politics could or did. The imaginative and linguistic markers of Endymion are mapped and analysed in order to prove that Keats produced a “poetics of uncontrollability”, a series of textual and stylistic strategies, which violated linguistic and narrative standards, and which were, therefore, perceived as unsettling.

John Keats was one of the central figures of English Romanticism and is still one of England's most popular poets. This sourcebook brings together texts and documents that provide a gateway towards an understanding of the man, his life and his work.

Psychologically and philosophically oriented, this work concentrates on the minor poetry of Keats and how that poetry serves as an enlightenment to the artist's multifaceted mind and spirit.

This book offers an exciting reassessment of Keats with particular emphasis on gender identity and sexuality. Traditionally, Keats has been more readily associated with the 'feminine' than any other canonical male English poet. This feminization was always likely, given his tragically early death and the mythologizing which took place soon after. In contrast, John Whale explores Keats's writings from the perspective of masculinity and gender by placing them in the context of contemporary friendship groupings and coterie relationships. Whale addresses all the major poems and gives due prominence to the letters. In so doing, he offers a new understanding of Keats's exploration of poetry, gender and desire, and provides an extended analysis of Keats's quest for poetic fame in the face of the often conflicting forces of love and sexuality. Clear, concise and insightful, this is an essential guide to one of the best-known Romantic poets.