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.)
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.)
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>
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.)
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.)
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’s attention to the fine workings of sensory imagery creates cognitive effects that go beyond his famed synesthesia.)
‘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.)
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.)
Reinforced by regular commemoration ceremonies, the continuing sanctity of the poets’ graves has survived despite various attempts to ‘improve’ them.)
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.)
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.)
Ode to Psycheas an experimental poem self-conscious of its own historical production.)
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 3.12 11th September 2021. SVN revision 1821.
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Blank, G. Kim. “Selected Criticism about Keats.” Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology. Edition 3.12 , University of Victoria, 11 September 2021. https://johnkeats.uvic.ca/criticism.html.
G. Kim Blank, “Selected Criticism about Keats,” Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology, Edition 3.12 , last modified 11th September 2021. https://johnkeats.uvic.ca/criticism.html.
Blank, G. Kim. “Selected Criticism about Keats.” Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology, Edition 3.12 , last modified 11th September 2021. https://johnkeats.uvic.ca/criticism.html.