This book provides a reappraisal of John Keats, taking a literary-philosophical approach to his work. Working from Keats's own accounts of feeling and thinking, the book draws connections between Romantic poetics and the contemporary branches of continental philosophy, reclaiming the thoughtfulness of Keats's 'life of sensations.'

John Keats remains one of the most familiar and beloved of English poets, but has received surprisingly little critical attention in recent years. This study is a fresh contribution to Keats criticism and Romantic scholarship, positioning Keats as a figure of philosophical interest who warrants renewed attention. Exploring Keats’s own Romantic accounts of feeling and thinking, this study draws a connection between poetry and the phenomenological branches of modern philosophy. The study takes Keats’s poetic evocation of touching hands, wandering feet, beating hearts and breathing bodies as a descriptive elaboration of consciousness and a phenomenological account of experience. The philosophical terms of analysis adopted here challenge the orthodoxies of Keats scholarship, traditionally characterised by the careful historicisation of a limited canon. The philosophical framework of analysis enhances the readings put forward, while Keats’s poems, in turn, serve to give fuller expression of those ideas themselves. Using Keats as a particular case, this book also demonstrates the ways in which theory and philosophy supplement literary scholarship.

John Keats is generally considered to be the least intellectually sophisticated of all the major Romantic poets, but he was a more serious thinker than either his contemporaries or later scholars have acknowledged. This book provides a major reassessment of Keats's intellectual life by considering his engagement with a formidable body of eighteenth-century thought from the work of Voltaire, Robertson, and Gibbon to Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith.The book re-examines some of Keats's most important poems, including The Eve of St Agnes, Hyperion, Lamia, and Ode to Psyche, in the light of a range of Enlightenment ideas and contexts from literary history and cultural progress to anthropology, political economy, and moral philosophy. By demonstrating that the language and ideas of the Enlightenment played a key role in establishing his poetic agenda, Keats's poetry is shown to be less the expression of an intuitive young genius than the product of the cultural and intellectual contexts of his time.

"When I say this book is a love story, I mean it is about things that cannot be gotten over-like this world, and some of the people in it." In 1819, the poet John Keats wrote six poems that would become known as the Great Odes. Some of them-"Ode to a Nightingale," "To Autumn"-are among the most celebrated poems in the English language. Anahid Nersessian here collects and elucidates each of the odes and offers a meditative, personal essay in response to each, revealing why these poems still have so much to say to us, especially in a time of ongoing political crisis. Her Keats is an unflinching antagonist of modern life-of capitalism, of the British Empire, of the destruction of the planet-as well as a passionate idealist for whom every poem is a love poem. The book emerges from Nersessian's lifelong attachment to Keats's poetry; but more, it "is a love story: between me and Keats, and not just Keats." Drawing on experiences from her own life, Nersessian celebrates Keats even as she grieves him and counts her own losses-and Nersessian, like Keats, has a passionate awareness of the reality of human suffering, but also a willingness to explore the possibility that the world, at least, could still be saved. Intimate and speculative, this brilliant mix of the poetic and the personal will find its home among the numerous fans of Keats's enduring work.

In recent years philosophers have produced important books on nearly all the major arts: the novel and painting, music and theatre, dance and architecture, conceptual art and even gardening. Poetry is the sole exception. This is an astonishing omission, one this collection of original essays will correct. If contemporary philosophy still regards metaphors such as 'Juliet is the sun' as a serious problem, one has an acute sense of how prepared it is to make philosophical and aesthetic sense of poems such W. B. Yeats's 'The Second Coming', Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy', or Paul Celan's 'Todesfuge'. The Philosophy of Poetry brings together philosophers of art, language, and mind to expose and address the array of problems poetry raises for philosophy. In doing so it lays the foundation for a proper philosophy of poetry, setting out the various puzzles and paradoxes that future work in the field will have to address. Given its breadth of approach, the volume is relevant not only to aesthetics but to all areas of philosophy concerned with meaning, truth, and the communicative and expressive powers of language more generally. Poetry is the last unexplored frontier in contemporary analytic aesthetics, and this volume offers a powerful demonstration of how central poetry should be to philosophy.

Argues that Keat's six odes form a sequence, identifies their major themes, and provides detailed interpretations of the poems' philosophy, mythological references, and lyric structures.