The Poetry of John Keats

A critical study of a selection of Keats’ major poems in the context of English literary romanticism, designed for year 12 students and university under-graduates. Includes further reading.

The volume examines Keats’s most important ideas and a selection of his major poems. It discusses the embodiment of those ideas in the poems, always with an awareness that poems have their own formal modes of operation.

As Haskell notes:

Keats once wrote about religion, ‘I do not think myself more in the right that other people and … nothing in this world is provable.’ This is the critical stance I have tried to adopt towards Keats’ own writings; its success will come if it sends readers back to Keats’s poems and letters with intensified enthusiasm.