Reception and Poetics in Keats - (Romanticism in Perspective: Texts, Cultures, Histories) by J Robinson (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

'...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

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.