The Keats Brothers

The Keats Brothers
Author: Denise Gigante
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 552
Release: 2013-10-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0674263782

John and George Keats—Man of Genius and Man of Power, to use John’s words—embodied sibling forms of the phenomenon we call Romanticism. George’s 1818 move to the western frontier of the United States, an imaginative leap across four thousand miles onto the tabula rasa of the American dream, created in John an abysm of alienation and loneliness that would inspire the poet’s most plangent and sublime poetry. Denise Gigante’s account of this emigration places John’s life and work in a transatlantic context that has eluded his previous biographers, while revealing the emotional turmoil at the heart of some of the most lasting verse in English. In most accounts of John’s life, George plays a small role. He is often depicted as a scoundrel who left his brother destitute and dying to pursue his own fortune in America. But as Gigante shows, George ventured into a land of prairie fires, flat-bottomed riverboats, wildcats, and bears in part to save his brothers, John and Tom, from financial ruin. There was a vital bond between the brothers, evident in John’s letters to his brother and sister-in-law, Georgina, in Louisville, Kentucky, which run to thousands of words and detail his thoughts about the nature of poetry, the human condition, and the soul. Gigante demonstrates that John’s 1819 Odes and Hyperion fragments emerged from his profound grief following George’s departure and Tom’s death—and that we owe these great works of English Romanticism in part to the deep, lasting fraternal friendship that Gigante reveals in these pages.

Keats

Keats
Author: Andrew Motion
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 702
Release: 1999-04-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780226542409

Andrew Motion's dramatic narration of Keats's life is the first in a generation to take a fresh look at this great English Romantic poet. Unlike previous biographers, Motion pays close attention to the social and political worlds Keats inhabited. Making incisive use of the poet's inimitable letters, Motion presents a masterful account. "Motion has given us a new Keats, one who is skinned alive, a genius who wrote in a single month all the poems we cherish, a victim who was tormented by the best doctors of the age. . . . This portrait, stripped of its layers of varnish and restored to glowing colours, should last us for another generation."—Edmund White, The Observer Review "Keats's letters fairly leap off the page. . . . [Motion] listens for the 'freely associating inquiry and incomparable verve and dash,' the 'headlong charge,' of Keats's jazzlike improvisations, which give us, like no other writing in English, the actual rush of a man thinking, a mind hurtling forward unpredictably and sweeping us along."—Morris Dickstein, New York Times Book Review "Scrupulous and eloquent."—Gregory Feeley, Philadelphia Inquirer

Joseph Severn, A Life

Joseph Severn, A Life
Author: Sue Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2009-10-08
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0199565023

A new biography of Joseph Severn, Keats's best-known but most controversial friend, who is buried next to him in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. Severn accompanied the dying poet to Italy and was virtually the only witness of his last days. Brown reassesses Severn's character and the nature of his friendship with Keats.

Keats’s Negative Capability

Keats’s Negative Capability
Author: Brian Rejack
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2019-01-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1786949717

Few critical terms coined by poets are more famous than “negative capability.” Though Keats uses the mysterious term only once, a consensus about its meaning has taken shape over the last two centuries. Keats’s Negative Capability: New Origins and Afterlives offers alternative ways to approach and understand Keats’s seductive term.

The Poetics of Uncontrollability in Keats's Endymion

The Poetics of Uncontrollability in Keats's Endymion
Author: Anna Anselmo
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2017-03-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1443879134

Endymion is the trâit d'union between Keats’s juvenilia and his better known, and conventionally more mature, works. By its nature, it is a transitional work, and thus gives the scholar special insight into the development of Keats’s poetics and idiom. Moreover, Endymion is the Keatsian work which most rattled and provoked critics of its time. This book reconstructs the linguistic context of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries in order to explain the reviewers’ unease with regard to Endymion. It shows that eighteenth-century prescriptivism arose from a deep-seated anxiety of language, Lockean in origin, and that the ensuing desire to stabilize and therefore control language informed Romantic criticism in general, and the criticism of Keats’s work in particular, more fundamentally than politics could or did. The imaginative and linguistic markers of Endymion are mapped and analysed in order to prove that Keats produced a “poetics of uncontrollability”, a series of textual and stylistic strategies, which violated linguistic and narrative standards, and which were, therefore, perceived as unsettling.

Keats, Modesty and Masturbation

Keats, Modesty and Masturbation
Author: Rachel Schulkins
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2016-04-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 131710935X

Examining John Keats’s reworking of the romance genre, Rachel Schulkins argues that he is responding to and critiquing the ideals of feminine modesty and asexual femininity advocated in the early nineteenth century. Through close readings of Isabella; or the Pot of Basil, The Eve of St. Agnes, Lamia and ’La Belle Dame sans Merci,’ Schulkins offers a re-evaluation of Keats and his poetry designed to demonstrate that Keats’s sexual imagery counters conservative morality by encoding taboo desires and the pleasures of masturbation. In so doing, Keats presents a version of female sexuality that undermines the conventional notion of the asexual female. Schulkins engages with feminist criticism that largely views Keats as a misogynist poet who is threatened by the female’s overwhelming sexual and creative presence. Such criticism, Schulkins shows, tends towards a problematic identification between poet and protagonist, with the text seen as a direct rendering of authorial ideology. Such an interpretation neither distinguishes between author, protagonist, text, social norms and cultural history nor recognises the socio-sexual and political undertones embedded in Keats’s rendering of the female. Ultimately, Schulkins’s book reveals how Keats’s sexual politics and his refutation of the asexual female model fed the design, plot and vocabulary of his romances.

Keats and Shelley

Keats and Shelley
Author: Kelvin Everest
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2022-01-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192849506

Keats and Shelley: Winds of Light combines unrivalled textual knowledge, biographical and contextual expertise, and profoundly insightful close readings of the poetry in a selection of outstanding essays from a leading critic of English Romantic Poetry. Some of the essays have been previously published and are established as classic studies, which have strongly influenced scholarly interpretation of the poems they discuss, including landmark readings of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, 'Julian and Maddalo' and 'Ozymandias', and Keats's 'Isabella: or the Pot of Basil' and his sonnet 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer'. These are brought into relationship with new work on the two poets, in a wide-ranging set of meditations which centre on Shelley's great elegy for Keats, Adonais. An introductory chapter considers the strongly contrasting poetic styles and achievement of the two iconic 'young Romantics', a contrast which has been obscured by their conventional close pairing in popular culture. Five studies of Keats are followed by a pivotal account of Shelley's elaborately-wrought poetic tribute to Keats's destined greatness, which leads in to a balancing six studies of Shelley. Both poets are situated illuminatingly in their literary, personal, and social-historical milieu, through a series of perspectives which combine lucid particularity with powerful generalization. The essays move from detailed analysis of textual minutiae to deep reflection on fundamental themes in the work of Keats and Shelley, including the ultimate themes of transience and permanence, and of life, death, and immortality.

Romantic Medicine and John Keats

Romantic Medicine and John Keats
Author: Hermione De Almeida
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 429
Release: 1991
Genre: Literature and medicine
ISBN: 0195063074

Using original research in scientific treatises, philosophical manuscripts, and political documents, this pioneering study describes the neglected era of revolutionary medicine in Europe through the writings of the English poet and physician, John Keats. De Almeida explores the four primary concerns of Romantic medicine--the physician's task, the meaning of life, the prescription of disease and health, and the evolution of matter and mind--and reveals their expression in Keats's poetry and thought. By delineating a distinct but unknown era in the history of medicine, charting the poet's milieu within this age, and providing close reading of his poems in these contexts, Romantic Medicine and John Keats illustrates the interdisciplinary bonds between the two healing arts of the Romantic period: medicine and poetry.

Coleridge and Textual Instability

Coleridge and Textual Instability
Author: Jack Stillinger
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 1994-05-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0195358929

Jack Stillinger establishes and documents the existence of numerous different authoritative versions of Coleridge's best-known poems: sixteen or more of The Eolian Harp, for example, eighteen of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and comparable numbers for This Lime-Tree Bower, Frost at Midnight, Kubla Khan, Christabel, and Dejection: An Ode. Such multiplicity of versions raises interesting theoretical and practical questions about the constitution of the Coleridge canon, the ontological identity of any specific work in the canon, the editorial treatment of Coleridge's works, and the ways in which multiple versions complicate interpretation of the poems as a unified (or, as the case may be, disunified) body of work. Providing much new information about the texts and production of Coleridge's major poems, Stillinger's study offers intriguing new theories about the nature of authorship and the constitution of literary works.