This article explores the notions of flotsam, jetsam and hybridity in John Keats’s poetry in order to provide a critical reading informed by posthumanist theories, and, more specifically, Donna Haraway’s cyborg.)
Keats’s ‘Forebodings’: Margate, Spring 1817, and After.Romanticism 21.1 (2015): 1-13. (Profitably analyses and contextualizes Keats’s sometimes morbid, depressive temperament.)
‘—My Brother Tom is Much Improved—’: The Suffering Body at the Ends of Keats’s Letters and Poems.Keats-Shelley Review 34:2 (2020): 118-37. (
Tom’s suffering is [. . .] what motivates Keats’s to write in the first place – it is the origin of his poetic imagination and the conclusion of his [Keats’s] poetic project.)
the two [Keats and Fitzgerald] lived with echoing fates: both died young, loved to drink, were plagued by tuberculosis, were haunted by their first love, and wrote into a new decade of release, experimentation and decadence.)
Hyperion’s Asterisks: Seeing Stars & Star Power.European Romantic Review 33:2 (2022): 267-282. (Argues that the asterisks at the end of Hyperion in the 1820 collection
connect the potential of Keats’s unfinished poem with legends of star poets and promote his rising star power in the spectacular light of Apollo’s transformation into the sun god of poetry.)
Keats’s Odes, Socratic Irony, and Regency Reviewers.Keats-Shelley Journal 62 (2013): 114-132.
The Beating Art of Keats’s Surgical Poetics.Études Anglaises 64:2 (2011): 182-96. (Keats always went back to his medical readings as a unique rapprochement between medicine and poetry which, in British Romanticism, is specific to him.)
The Voice of the Sod: Keats’s Nightingale from Below.Essays in Romanticism 30:1 (2023): 41-54. (
Organizationally . . . the Nightingale Ode is about Keats’s frustration at the task of ode-writing; he begins unsure of himself and seeking definition.)
‘Where beats the human heart’: Jean-Nicolas Corvisart’s Treatise on Diseases of the Heart and John Keats’s Hyperion Poems.European Romantic Review 33:2 (2022): 247-265.
Keats’s bee imagery may have been informed by the idea of insect pollination, an idea that was widely socialised if as yet unorthodox in his time . . . [this has] social, sexual, and political implications.)
Situates the lives and work of the poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley within the literary, cultural, political, and social currents of their time.)
Keats, Incorporated: Social Authorship and the Making of a Brand.European Romantic Review 33:2, (2022): 137-156. (Argues that practical-minded Keats was interested in the business of literature, and how 1820 volume
constructs a marketable authorial persona—one that emerges from that earlier maligned volume.)
Keats and Brown Reading.European Romantic Review 33.2 (2022): 212-38. (Examines the influence of reports from British India on Keats’s poems—in particular, on Hyperon, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Isabella,” and associated letters; networks of Brown reading challenge assumptions about interpreting Keats.)
untimely poetand a political one.)
This meditative essay uses the metaphor of the patagium, the unique fold of skin that stretches between the limbs of a bat, as a way to conceptualize John Clare’s and John Keats’s engagement with ancient poetic traditions and Romantic theories of mind.)
concerted effort to offer systematic close readings and literary analyses of the letters.) <http://keatslettersproject.com>
This essay adopts the four-stage dialectical sequence Michael McKeon proposes for the history of the British novel as a template for interpreting Keats’s career.)
This book explores John Keats’s reading practices and intertextual dialogues with other writers [as well as] later writers’ engagements with Keats’s poetry.)
Beyond Narration: Keats’s Mortal Tongue and His Hyperions.Keats-Shelley Journal 69 (2020): 57-81. (In his Hyperion projects,
Keats presents a world that precedes language and demonstrates his negative capability by questioning linguistic complacency in narrative representation.)
Keats regarded both poetic material and the mental faculties deployed in the creation of poetry as somatically embodied and that through this the representational quality of the poetic medium, language, is elided.)
Reciprocal Keats,in Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation. Stanford UP, 2022: 119-145. (Explores the expectations of affective reciprocity that characterize Keats’s poetics; these motivate the complex negotiations between pursuit and retreat underlying his expressions.)
Keats saw passivity as an embodied, and even physically demanding, attitude, that could prompt the interest and attention of others.)
Shiftiness in Keats’s ‘Ode on Indolence’.Romanticism, 23.1 (2017): 27-37. (Argues that the poem with
its wordplay, ambiguity and structural instability [. . .] presents an unsettling, more mischievous side of Negative Capability.)
sleep-states [rather than dreams] become a site of erotic intensity and power-play [. . .] through depictions of sleep, Keats creates a paradoxical, knowing eroticism where the senses are aroused even though the will is suspended.)
Invoking Keats.Keats-Shelley Journal 67 (2018): 108-21. (This essay
pose[s] the question of what animates [. . .] the desire to welcome Keats the person into a poem.)
lower-middle-class outsider from a tragic and dysfunctional family, whose extraordinary energy and love of language allowed him to pummel his way into the heart of English literature [. . .] not the ethereal figure of his posthumous myth.)
how, for Keats, human identity emerges from the imagination’s necessarily incomplete attempts to comprehend the fullness of its historical experience.)
This article argues that John Keats’s 1817 first volume Poems evinces a commitment to occasionalism that suffuses, and indeed defines, Keats’s work.)
[Nersessian’s] Keats is an unflinching antagonist of modern life—of capitalism, of the British Empire, of the destruction of the planet—as well as a passionate idealist for whom every poem is a love poem.)
Keats and Catachresis,in The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life. Chicago UP, 2020. (This chapter
considers Keats’s oft-derided sensuousness as an elective affliction, a way of making language strain past its breaking point.)
Keats’s attention to the fine workings of sensory imagery creates cognitive effects that go beyond his famed synesthesia.)
repeatedly demonstrate Keats’s sophisticated thinking about mediation, especially his insistence that aspects of mediation appear hidden or unknowable, and that they operate through separation as much as through connection.)
a mental experiment: what if the final poem of the 1820 volume had not been Hyperion but rather The Cap and Bells?)
‘Murdered Man’: Re-Examining Keats in The Examiner.The Keats-Shelley Review 35:1 (2021): 11-29. (Ingeniously based on a serendipitous chance connection between a newspaper report and Keats’s Isabella; or the Pot of Basil.)
Modern Experimental Poets Reading Keats: ‘Misers of Sound and Syllable’,in Keats Reading / Reading Keats, ed. Beth Lau, Greg Kucich, & Daniel Johnson. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022, 273-298. (Sees Keats as a major source for a twentieth-century avant-garde of linguistic othering, the recovery of a “mother tongue,” a subversion—a minorization—of cultural speech, and a wide-spread conviction among experimental writers.)
1820: Poetics ‘In the Spirit of Outlawry’.European Romantic Review 33:2 (2022), 157-174. (Argues that the 1820 volume puts forward a consistent program of radical poetics; the 1820 romances are dramas of successful or unsuccessful attempts at controlling the desires of the other.)
John Keats, English Poet (Made in America).Keats-Shelley Journal 65 (2016): 112-125.
Keats, Housekeeping and the Poetry of Mourning.European Romantic Review 33:2 (2022): 229-245. (
Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980) bears strong affinities with English Romanticism and forges even stronger ties with the poems of Keats’s 1820 volume and the concepts of Negative Capability and the Chameleon Poet.)
within the framework of materialist possibility [. . .]. Further discussion is offered regarding Romantic philosophies of matter and ideals, readdressing their implications on literary aesthetics.)
early letters present unequivocal testimony that he understands friendship not as an escape from the painful world [. . .] but as one important way of coming to terms with it.)
The Myths of Pleasure in Keats’s ‘Fancy’.Keats-Shelley Journal 69 (2020): 21-36. (In his poem
Fancy,
Keats develops a distinctly psychoanalytic theory of the pleasure principle, in which the play of literary language is central.)
Reinforced by regular commemoration ceremonies, the continuing sanctity of the poets’ graves has survived despite various attempts to ‘improve’ them.)
Keats, Distance, and Feeling-States.ELH 89.4 9 (2022): 1019-48. (Suggests that Keats’s feeling-states amounts to a counterhistoricist aesthetics also germane to minoritized and postcolonial writers, and to the global citizen haplessly, today, immersed in streams of news-data.)
Keats’s sensitive and self-conscious engagement with distance is played out in the letters he writes while dealing with the aftermath, and threat, of death.)
analyses the [1820] collection as an authorially organised and multi-dimensionally unified volume rather than as a collection of occasional poems,and fully engaged with Burton’s work.)
‘I May Write My name’: A Collector’s Fog-Born Elf.Keats-Shelley Review 37:1 (2023): 12-27. (A personal and surprising essay about cultic misprision of a manuscript leaf holding on one side Keats’s
Sonnet to Sleep.)
[R]eaders will rediscover a virtuoso poet, by turns lively, experimental, self-ironizing, outrageous, and philosophical [and readings that] redefine the breadth and depth of Keats’s poetic imagination, from intellectual jests and satires to erotic bandying, passionate confessions, and reflections on mortality.)
This essay gathers the outcast ‘Indolence’ and the outlier ‘Fancy’ from the margins of curated ‘Keats’ for fresh consideration, as lodges of energies that Keats wanted to conjure into legitimacy.)
Ode to Psycheas an experimental poem self-conscious of its own historical production.)
Here are four of Keats’s letters showing the man and the craftsman embracing life’s energies with death on a too-near horizon.)
Determined not Predetermined: Keats’s Emergence as a Poet in 1817.Keats Shelley Journal 67 (2018): 70-86.
Keats’s writing harbors figures to which Yeats could respond, even correspond, vexed as he was by ‘Keats’ as the name for the puerile outsider’s dreamy sensuousness that a proper ‘modernist’ needed to spurn.A development of this essay also appears as a chapter in Wolfson’s Romantic Shades and Shadows [Johns Hopkins UP, 2018], which also has other discussions of Keats.)
Constructing Keats.Keats-Shelley Journal 67 (2018): 122-139. (A wonderfully contextualizing essay that surveys
the extant swaths of energy, vibrations, and gravitational fields that connect what little we know, or can surmise, about publication of Keats’s first book.)
Keats’s Death: Towards a Posthumous Poetics.Studies in Romanticism 48.2 (2009): 321-348, 368.
Keats and Coleridge.In Coleridge, Keats, and the Imagination: Romanticism and Adam’s Dream. Ed. J. Robert Barth and John Mahoney. Columbia: U. of Missouri P., 1990.
©2018 G. Kim Blank
English Department, University of Victoria
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Edition 3.26 12th July 2023. SVN revision 1996.
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Blank, G. Kim. “Selected Criticism about Keats.” Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology. Edition 3.26 , University of Victoria, 12 July 2023. https://johnkeats.uvic.ca/criticism.html.
G. Kim Blank, “Selected Criticism about Keats,” Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology, Edition 3.26 , last modified 12th July 2023. https://johnkeats.uvic.ca/criticism.html.
Blank, G. Kim. “Selected Criticism about Keats.” Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology, Edition 3.26 , last modified 12th July 2023. https://johnkeats.uvic.ca/criticism.html.