Reading John Keats

This book explores John Keats's major works in the context of his reading and the world in which he shaped his career.

Susan J. Wolfson (Author)

9780521513418, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 21 May 2015

198 pages, 10 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.6 x 1.4 cm, 0.44 kg

“In Reading John Keats, Susan Wolfson offers a dazzling tour of Keats's poetry across the brief, blazoned arc of his career … Over the course of ten svelte, fast-paced chapters, Wolfson assembles an anthology of stunning readings of poetry readers find they may not know quite as well as they presumed. Whether one is looking into Keats's sonnet on Chapman's Homer for the first time, one sees - and hears - it anew under Wolfson's tutelage.' The Wordsworth Circle

John Keats (1795–1821), one of the best-loved poets of the Romantic period, is ever alive to words, discovering his purposes as he reads - not only books but also the world around him. Leading Keats scholar Susan J. Wolfson explores the breadth of his works, including his longest ever poem Endymion; subsequent romances, Isabella (a Boccaccio tale with a proto-Marxian edge admired by George Bernard Shaw), the passionate Eve of St Agnes and knotty Lamia; intricate sonnets and innovative odes; the unfinished Hyperion project (Keats's existential rethinking of epic agony); and late lyrics involved with Fanny Brawne, the bright (sometimes dark) star of his last years. Illustrated with manuscript pages, title-pages, and two portraits, Reading John Keats investigates the brilliant complexities of Keats's imagination and his genius in wordplay, uncovering surprises and new delights, and encouraging renewed respect for the power of Keats's thinking and the subtle turns of his writing.

1. Life and times
2. Conceiving early poems, and Poems
3. Falling in love with Endymion, A Poetic Romance. Rereading King Lear
4. Venturing 'new Romance': Isabella
or, The Pot of Basil. A Story from Boccaccio
5. Falling with Hyperion
6. Still romancing: The Eve of St Agnes: a dream-sonnet
La belle dame
7. Reforming the sonnet and forming the Odes of 1819: Psyche, Nightingale, Grecian Urn, Melancholy, Indolence
8. Writhing, wreathing, writing Lamia
9. Falling in fall 1819: The Fall of Hyperion and To Autumn
10. Last poems and lasting Keats
A few famous formulations
At a glance: Keats in context
Further reading.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC]