The poems of John Keats have traditionally been regarded as most resistant of all Romantic poetry to the concerns of history and politics. But critical trends have begun to overturn this assumption. Keats and History brings together exciting work by British and American scholars, in thirteen essays which respond to interest in the historical dimensions of Keats's poems and letters, and open alternative perspectives on his achievement. Keats's writings are approached through politics, social history, feminism, economics, historiography, stylistics, aesthetics, and mathematical theory. The editor's introduction places the volume in relation to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century readings of the poet. Keats and History will be welcomed by students of English literature, and by all those interested in English Romanticism.

This book considers Keats’s major poems as exercises in Romantic historicism. The poetry’s rich allusiveness represents Keats’s effort to reclaim the British canon for Cockney revisionism, and reveals Keats characteristically invoking the past to define his contemporary cultural politics. The book begins by discussing Keats’s Cockney traditionalism in its Regency context and then proceeds through the poet’s career in chronological order. There are chapters on history and vocation in the poet’s first volume, the failed idealism of 'Endymion', gender and audience in the Medieval Romances, the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' in historical context, secularism and consolation in the other great Odes, and then the two 'Hyperion' fragments, in which history ramifies beyond poetic method to become the explicit subject of inquiry. The result is a stimulating reassessment of Keats’s intellectual development and most admired poems.

Offers a biography of the nineteenth century poet, offering insights into the details of his early life in London, the torments that affected him, and the imaginative sources of his works.

A dazzling new look into the short but intense, tragic life and remarkable work of John Keats, one of the greatest lyric poets of the English language, seen in a whole new light, not as the mythologized Victorian guileless nature-lover, but as the subversive, bawdy complex cynic whose life and poetry were lived and created on the edge. In this brief life, acclaimed biographer Lucasta Miller takes nine of Keats's best-known poems—"Endymion"; "On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer"; "Ode to a Nightingale"; "To Autumn"; "Bright Star" among them—and excavates how they came to be and what in Keats's life led to their creation. She writes of aspects of Keats's life that have been overlooked, and explores his imagination in the context of his world and experience, paying tribute to the unique quality of his mind. Miller, through Keats’s poetry, brilliantly resurrects and brings vividly to life, the man, the poet in all his complexity and spirit, living dangerously, disdaining respectability and cultural norms, and embracing subversive politics. Keats was a lower-middle-class outsider from a tragic and fractured family, whose extraordinary energy and love of language allowed him to pummel his way into the heart of English literature; a freethinker and a liberal at a time of repression, who delighted in the sensation of the moment. We see how Keats was regarded by his contemporaries (his writing was seen as smutty) and how the young poet’s large and boisterous life—a man of the metropolis, who took drugs, was sexually reckless and afflicted with syphilis—went straight up against the Victorian moral grain; and Miller makes clear why his writing—considered marginal and avant-garde in his own day—retains its astonishing originality, sensuousness and power two centuries on.

Andrew Motion's dramatic narration of Keats's life is the first in a generation to take a fresh look at this great English Romantic poet. Unlike previous biographers, Motion pays close attention to the social and political worlds Keats inhabited. Making incisive use of the poet's inimitable letters, Motion presents a masterful account. "Motion has given us a new Keats, one who is skinned alive, a genius who wrote in a single month all the poems we cherish, a victim who was tormented by the best doctors of the age. . . . This portrait, stripped of its layers of varnish and restored to glowing colours, should last us for another generation."—Edmund White, The Observer Review "Keats's letters fairly leap off the page. . . . [Motion] listens for the 'freely associating inquiry and incomparable verve and dash,' the 'headlong charge,' of Keats's jazzlike improvisations, which give us, like no other writing in English, the actual rush of a man thinking, a mind hurtling forward unpredictably and sweeping us along."—Morris Dickstein, New York Times Book Review "Scrupulous and eloquent."—Gregory Feeley, Philadelphia Inquirer

John and George Keats—Man of Genius and Man of Power—embodied sibling forms of Romanticism. George’s emigration to the U.S. frontier created an abysm of loneliness and alienation in John that would inspire his most plangent and sublime poetry. Gigante’s account places John’s life in a transatlantic context that has eluded his previous biographers.

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.