Occasioned by the spirit of celebrating Keats's 200th birthday (31 October 1995), Jeffrey C. Robinson's Reception and Poetics in Keats offers at once a history and readings of the many praise and commemorative poems to or about Keats (collected in an appendix) from the time of his early death up to the present day and a consequent rethinking of Keats's own poems and poetics. Keats emerges as a poet uniquely available and useful to the experimental poets of our own time.

Beginning with a reassessment of contemporary romantic studies, this book provides a modern critical comparison of Keats and Shelley. The study offers detailed close readings of a variety of literary genres (including the romance, lyric, elegy and literary fragment) adopted by Keats and Shelley to explore their poetic treatment of self and form. The poetic careers of Keats and Shelley embrace a tragic affirmation of those darker elements latent in the earlier writings to meditate on their own posthumous reception and reputation. Fresh readings of Keats and Shelley show how they conceive of the self as fictional and anticipate Nietzsche's modern theories of subjectivity. Nietzsche's conception of the subject as a site of conflicting fictions usefully measures this emergent sense of poetic self and form in Keats and Shelley. This Nietzschean perspective enriches our appreciation of the considerable artistic achievement of these two significant second-generation romantic poets.

This book explores the sexual implications of reading Keats. Keats was lambasted by critics throughout the nineteenth century for his sensuousness and his 'effeminacy'. The Victorians simultaneously identified with, imitated, and distrusted the 'unmanly' poet. Writers, among them Alfred Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Addington Symonds, Walter Pater, and Wilfred Owen came to terms with Keats's work by creating out of the 'effeminate' poet a sexual and literary ally.

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.

English-language and Italian scholars led by Christensen (English literature, John Cabot U., Rome) reassert Keat's stature in the Western canon, by countering critics since Byron and analyzing the poet's texts and influence. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Of the sixty-seven sonnets composed by John Keats fifty are commented here. The number sixty-seven is inclusive of ‘Nature withheld Cassandra in the skies’, Keats’s unfinished translation of Ronsard’s sonnet ‘Nature ornant Cassandre qui devoyt’, and of The Poet, that is not universally acknowledged as composed by Keats. The sonnets proposed thus present an ample spectrum of Keats’s sonnet writing and cover the span of his writing career, from 1814 to 1819. The sonnets are commented in chronological order: two belong to the year 1814, three to 1815, seventeen to 1816, six to 1817, thirteen to 1818 and nine to 1819. For each sonnet, the text is presented, followed by the date of composition and of the first publication. An indication of the typology to which the sonnet belongs and of its rhyme scheme is also furnished. The text is based on the editions of Miriam Allott, The Poems of John Keats, Longman, London, 1972 [1970], Jack Stillinger, John Keats: Complete Poems, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1982 [1978], John Barnard, John Keats: The Complete Poems, Penguin Books, London, 1988 [1973], Nicholas Roe, John Keats: Selected Poems, Dent, London, 2000 [1995], and Paul Wright, The Poems of John Keats, Wordsworth Poetry Library, Ware, 2001. For the dating, that proposed by Miriam Allott has been followed. For each sonnet the circumstances of its composition, when known, are referred. The letters of Keats are cited to provide information on the date and on the events surrounding the writing of the poems, to furnish the poet’s own comments concerning the sonnets, and to document parallels in wording, images and thoughts, useful for the analysis on hand, as well as other more general observations and reflections of the poet retained to be pertinent for a better understanding of the poems. The edition from which the citations of the letters are taken is that of Grant F. Scott, Selected Letters of John Keats, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2002, integrated, when necessary, by that of Hyder Edward Rollins, The Letters of John Keats 1814-1821, 2 vols., Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1958. Other important sources of information regarding the sonnets that have here been used are Richard Monckton Milnes’s edition of the life of Keats, Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats, 2 vols., London, 1848, the recollections of Charles Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers (1878), Centaur Press, Fontwell, 1969, and the literary remains of the Keats Circle, collected by Hyder Edward Rollins, The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers 1816-1879, 2 vols., Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1965 [1948]. For the meanings and significations of specific words, reference has been made to the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. on CD-ROM (v. 4.0), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009. Some of the sonnets have been commented in previous articles and books of the author, in particular in her Il primo Keats: lettura della poesia 1814-1818, Milella, Lecce, 1978, The Letters and Poems of John Keats’s Northern Tour, Europrint Publications, Milan, 1997 and John Keats and the Creative Process, Europrint Publications, Milan, 2001, but here the analyses are re-visited, integrated and modified. Tratto dall'Introduzione dell'Autrice

Andrew Bennett's original study of Keats focuses on questions of narrative and audience as a means to offer new readings of the major poems. It discusses ways in which reading is 'figured' in Keats's poetry, and suggests that such 'figures of reading' have themselves determined certain modes of response to Keats's texts. Together with important new readings of Keats's poetry, the study presents a significant rethinking of the relationship between Romantic poetry and its audience. Developing recent discussions in literary theory concerning narrative, readers and reading, the nature of the audience for poetry, and the Romantic 'invention' of posterity, Bennett elaborates a sophisticated and historically specific reconceptualization of Romantic writing.

For many readers, John Keats's achievement is to have attainted a supreme poetic maturity at so young an age. Canonical poems of resignation and acceptance such as 'To Autumn' are traditionally seen as examples par excellence of this maturity. In this highly innovative study, however, Marggraf Turley examines how, for Keats, an insistence on 'boyishness' in the midst of apparent mature imagery is the very essence of his political contestation of the literary establishment.

This anthology fills the need for a comprehensive, up-to-date collection of the most important contemporary writings on the English romantic poets. During the 1980s, many theoretical innovations in literary study swept academic criticism. Many of these approaches--from deconstructive, new historicist, and feminist perspectives--used romantic texts as primary examples and altered radically the ways in which we read. Other major changes have occurred in textual studies, dramatically transforming the works of these poets. The world of English romantic poetry has certainly changed, and Romantic Poetry keeps pace with those changes. Karl Kroeber and Gene W. Ruoff have organized the book by poet--Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelly, and Keats--and have included essays representative of key critical approaches to each poet's work. In addition to their excellent general introduction, the editors have provided brief, helpful forewords to each essay, showing how it reflects current approaches to its subject. The book also has an extensive bibliography sure to serve as an important research aid. Students on all levels will find this book invaluable.