Keats Reviewed By His Contemporaries

Jennifer Wunder makes a strong case for the importance of hermeticism and the secret societies to an understanding of John Keats's poetry and his speculations about religious and philosophical questions. Although secret societies exercised enormous cultural influence during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they have received little attention from Romantic scholars. And yet, information about the societies permeated all aspects of Romantic culture. Groups such as the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons fascinated the reading public, and the market was flooded with articles, pamphlets, and books that discussed the societies's goals and hermetic philosophies, debated their influence, and drew on their mythologies for literary inspiration. Wunder recovers the common knowledge about the societies and offers readers a first look at the role they played in the writings of Romantic authors in general and Keats in particular. She argues that Keats was aware of the information available about the secret societies and employed hermetic terminology and imagery associated with these groups throughout his career. As she traces the influence of these secret societies on Keats's poetry and letters, she offers readers a new perspective not only on Keats's writings but also on scholarship treating his religious and philosophical beliefs. While scholars have tended either to consider Keats's aesthetic and religious speculations on their own terms or to adopt a more historical approach that rejects an emphasis on the spiritual for a materialist interpretation, Wunder offers us a middle way. Restoring Keats to a milieu characterized by simultaneously worldly and mythological propensities, she helps to explain if not fully reconcile the insights of both camps.

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.

We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the Author.' (John Keats to J.H. Reynolds, Teignmouth May 1818)John Keats is one of Britain's best-known and most-loved poets. Despite dying in Rome in 1821, at the age of just 25, his poems continue to inspire a new generation who reinterpret and reinvent the ways in which we consume his work.Apart from his long association with Hampstead, North London, he has not previously been known as a poet of 'place' in the way we associate Wordsworth with the Lake District, for example, and for many years readers considered Keats's work remote from political and social context. Yet Keats was acutely aware of and influenced by his surroundings: Hampstead; Guy's Hospital in London where he trained as a doctor; Teignmouth where he nursed his brother Tom; a walking tour of the Lake District and Scotland; the Isle of Wight; the area around Chichester and in Winchester, where his last great ode, To Autumn, was composed.Far from the frail Romantic stereotype, Keats captivated people with his vitality and strength of character. He was also deeply interested in the life around him, commenting in his many letters and his poetry on historic events and the relationship between wealth and poverty. What impact did the places he visited have on him and how have those areas changed over two centuries? How do they celebrate their 'Keats connection'?Suzie Grogan takes the reader on a journey through Keats's life and landscapes, introducing us to his best and most influential work. In many ways a personal journey following a lifetime of study, the reader is offered opportunities to reflect on the impact of poetry and landscape on all our lives. The book is aimed at anyone wanting to know more about the places Keats visited, the times he lived through and the influences they may have had on his poetry. Utilising primary sources such as Keats's letters to friends and family and the very latest biographical and academic work, it offers an accessible way to see Keats through the lens of the places he visited and aims to spark a lasting interest in the real Keats - the poet and the man.

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.

In The Cambridge Companion to Keats, leading scholars discuss Keats's work in several fascinating contexts: literary history and key predecessors; Keats's life in London's intellectual, aesthetic and literary culture and the relation of his poetry to the visual arts. These specially commissioned essays are sophisticated but accessible, challenging but lucid, and are complemented by an introduction to Keats's life, a chronology, a list of contemporary people and periodicals, a source reference for famous phrases and ideas articulated in Keats's letters, a glossary of literary terms and a guide to further reading.

This bracing study redefines romanticism in terms of its philosophical habits of self-consciousness. According to Paul Hamilton, metaromanticism, or the ways in which writers of the romantic period generalized their own practices, was fundamentally characteristic of the romantic project itself. Through a close look at the aesthetics of Friedrich Schiller and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and key works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy and Mary Shelley, John Keats, Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and many others, Hamilton shows how the romantic movement's struggle with its own tenets was not an effort to seek an alternative way of thought, but instead a way of becoming what it already was. And yet, as he reveals, the romanticists were still not content with their own self-consciousness. Pushed to the limit, such contemplation either manifested itself as self-disgust or found aesthetic ideas regenerated in discourses outside of aesthetics altogether.

Text World Theory and Keats' Poetry applies advances in cognitive poetics and text world theory to four poems by the nineteenth century poet John Keats. It takes the existing text world theory as a starting point and draws on stylistics, literary theory, cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology and dream theories to explore reading poems in the light of their emphasis on states of desire, dreaming and nightmares. It accounts for the representation of these states and the ways in which they are likely to be processed, monitored and understood. Text World Theory and Keats' Poetry advances both the current field of cognitive stylistics but also analyses Keats in a way that offers new insights into his poetry. It is of interest to stylisticians and those in literary studies.