This accessible, informed, and engaging book offers fresh, new avenues into Keats’s poems and letters, including a valuable introduction to “the responsible poet.” Focusing on Keats’s sense of responsibility to truth, poetry, and the reader, G. Douglas Atkins, a noted T.S. Eliot critic, writes as an ama-teur. He reads the letters as literary texts, essayistic and dramatic; the Odes in comparison with Eliot’s treatment of similar subjects; “The Eve of St. Agnes” by adding to his respected earlier article on the poem an addendum outlining a bold new reading; “Lamia” by focusing on its complex and perplexing treatment of philosophy and imagination and revealing how Keats literally represents philosophy as functioning within poetry. Comparing Keats with Eliot, poet-philosopher, this book generates valuable insight into Keats’s successful and often sophisticated poetic treatment of ideas, accentuating the image of him as “the responsible poet.”
Table of Content
Preface.- One: On Putting Keats in Other Words: Essaying toward Reader-Responsibility.- Two: Reading the Letters: “The Vale of Soul-Making”.- Three: Some of the Dangers in “Unperplex[ing] bliss from its neighbour pain”: Reading the Odes Intra- and Inter-textually.- Four: Fleeing into the Storm: Beauty and Truth in “The Eve of St. Agnes”.- Five: “For Truth’s Sake”: “Lamia” and the Reweaving of the Rainbow.- Bibliography.- Index.
About the author
G. Douglas Atkins is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Kansas, USA, where he taught for 44 years. The winner of several awards for outstanding teaching, he is the author of twenty-two books and co-editor of three others, many of them published by Palgrave Macmillan. He now lives in Greenville, SC, and continues to write.
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