In focusing on the poetic treatment of self and literary form in Keats and Shelley, Mark Sandy shows how using Nietzsche's philosophy to illuminate Keats's correspondence and Shelley's A Defence of Poetry provides a conceptual basis for a comparative reading of the poets. Using key ideas from Nietzsche, Sandy explores Keats's Endymion and Shelley's Alastor as redefinitions of the romance genre. Further, he suggests that in their redescription of romance, Keats and Shelley discovered a radical mode of subjectivity that is present in Keats's major odes and Shelley's lyrical poetry as a conflict among poetic identity, art, and existence. In Sandy's reading, Shelley's Adonais and Keats's The Eve of St Mark emerge as diverse meditations on crises of posthumous reputation and future audience, whereas Keats's Hyperion fragments and Shelley's The Triumph of Life resolve these anxieties over authorial posterity by entrusting the reader with a new form of poetical self.
"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.
John Keats (1795–1821) continues to delight and challenge readers both within and beyond the academic community through his poems and letters. This volume provides frameworks for enhanced analysis and appreciation of Keats and his work, with each chapter supplying a succinct, informed, and accessible account of a particular topic. Leading scholars examine the life and work of Keats against the backdrop of his influences, contemporaries, and reception, and explore the interaction of poet and world. The essays consider his enduring but ever-altering appeal, engage with critical discussion and debate, and offer revisionary close reading of the poems and letters. Students and specialists will find their knowledge of Keats's life and work enriched by chapters that survey subjects ranging from education, relationships, and religion to art, genre, and film.
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.
The daringly imagined, masterfully realized story of poet John Keats's second life abroad. What if John Keats had not died in Rome at twenty-five, just as he was coming to realize his gifts? In this audaciously imagined alternate life story, the young poet is pulled back from the brink of death only to find his troubles far from over. He is short on money, far from home, his literary reputation anything but assured—but his life and imagination have been spared, and a new country awaits. In an Italy at uneasy peace, full of foreign armies and spies, Keats soon finds his loyalties divided. He is drawn into Percy and Mary Shelley’s expatriate circle, resumes his old profession of surgery and falls in with student revolutionaries who are plotting a more radical cure for their nation. His fiancée in London expects his return, and everyone is expecting his next poem, but he has not returned from his deathbed quite the same person—or poet—that he was. Written with erudition and compassion, Paul Kerschen’s debut novel is a spellbinding historical yarn and a heady engagement with the literature of the past, a thing of beauty in itself and a meditation on the writer’s duty in troubled times. “An ambitious, thrilling work of the imagination... The Warm South is so much: a love story, a historical thriller, a great literary what-if, and a profound meditation on the act of creation itself.” DANIEL MASON, New York Times bestselling author of The Winter Soldier and The Piano Tuner “A lyrical and profound exploration of mortality, second chances, art, and ambition. Kerschen writes an alternate history for the beloved poet Keats, allowing him to rise from an early deathbed and experience the gory operating theaters of Pisa, the decadence of Italian Carnival, and a seductive and sometimes dangerous entanglement with Mary and Percy Shelley. Written with elegance and heart, The Warm South pulses with life.” FRANCES DE PONTES PEEBLES, author of The Air You Breathe and The Seamstress “Paul Kerschen’s miraculous first novel grants the poet John Keats an extended life in Italy as the surgeon he trained to be, and as the husband and father he never became. Superbly imagined, impeccably written, uncanny in its intimacy with Keats’s mind and feelings, this book also conjures the Italy in which Keats lived and died—and here lives on. Kerschen brings this mate- rial astonishingly alive and close. This is the best novel I’ve read all year.” CARTER SCHOLZ, author of Gypsy and Radiance “The Warm South offers an alternate biography, a second chance—a daring and deeply imagined portrait of genius made more human, more accessible, and more moving and vital than any history or scholarship can allow.” VU TRAN, author of Dragonfish “A bold strike. Kerschen applies SF’s classic ‘what if’ to literature itself. And like stern Mary Shelley’s monster, the dead poet stirs, and rises, and walks. But the path between the old world and his new friends is steep... Come.” TERRY BISSON, author of Any Day Now and Bears Discover Fire
Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.
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.
James O'Rourke examines the ways in which the modern reception to Keats's major odes reveals the investments made in these poems by successive generations of critical schools, particularly New Criticism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and New Historicism. O'Rourke's reading of the odes locates them within the contexts of literary and cultural history and recovers the innovative force of the poems in a way that speaks to the aesthetics and the politics of the present. This study does much to illuminate what Keats's most virtuosic work has to say about history, nature, gender, ourselves, and each other.
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.
