Reception and Poetics in Keats: My Ended Poet(Romanticism in Perspective: Texts, Cultures, Histories)

Occasioned by the celebration of Keat's 200th birthday (31 October 1995), Jeffrey C. Robinson's Reception and Poetics in Keats: My Ended Poet begins with an extended reading of some of the many praise and commemorative poems (collected in an appendix here) to or about Keats written from the time of his early death up to the present day. Along with these poems, the public shrines of Keats, in particular those at Hampstead in England, where he wrote his most enduring poems, and at Rome, where he died and was buried, are described and interpreted as influences upon the traditional understanding of his work. Keats, the poet-who-died-too-young, produced a poetry of closure and finality, elegiac and autumnal. But Robinson focuses, in the second part of the book, on Keats as one who anticipates the visionary open-form poetry of some of the twentieth-century's major experimental poets.

Table of Contents:
Introduction - A Game of Shards: Keats's 'vitally metaphorical poetry' - Enshrinings: Public Memorials and Keatsian Poetics - Keats Enshrined in Poems: the 19th-century and Traditional Poetics - Readings - Flowers, Keats, and Death - Quoting the Nightingale - Biography and the Poet - Poetry and/as Biography: Amy Clampitt's A Homage to John Keats - Cosmic Biography: Tom Clark's Junkets on a Sad Planet - More Readings: Towards an Open Poetics in Keats: Countee Cullen, Mae Cowdery, Galway Kinnell, Robert Browning - Mark Halliday's 'There: for Keats' and Keats's 'Epistle to J.H. Reynolds, Esq': Against Monumental Poetry - Afterthought to 'There': Keats's 'Ode to Maia' - The Walking Tour of Scotland, 1818: The Play of Poetic Forms - Memos on Keats for the Next Millennium - Appendix: a Selection of Poems Written to or about John Keats: 1821-1994

About the Author :
JEFFREY C. ROBINSON is Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he has taught since 1971. He has published widely on Romantic literature and is known for his experiments with critical styles. His books include Radical Literary Education: a Classroom Experiment with Wordsworth's Ode, The Walk: Notes on a Romantic Image, The Current of Romantic Passion, and Romantic Presences: Living Images from the Age of Wordsworth and Shelley. He has just published a volume of poetry occasioned by the images, discourse, and figures from the Romantic movement, Spliced Romanticism.

Review :
'...Jeffrey Robinson devotes his efforts to dislodging Keats from the nineteenth century cultural milieu that defined his identity as a poet...Robinson is well read in the poetry of his own generation, in English and in other languages, and he uses this experience effectively as he considers the resonance of Keats in contemporary poetic practice...The book provides a valuable service...Intending to emphasize the highly volatile nature of reading an duse of evidence he employs a collage format-with quick shifts of focus, content, even texture and genre...I myself found (to my surprise - the journey exhilarating...Robinson belongs to no school; he has excused himself from discipleship. Eschewing the criticism that barters poetry for life and poetry for history (90), he has written a freshly inquisitive approach to central...critical questions...Robinson is feeling his way toward a radically new understanding of Keats...This book could signal a new era in Keats studies.' - Robert M. Ryan, The Wordsworth Circle