John Keats and the Culture of Dissent

Front Cover
Clarendon Press, 1998 - 315 pages
Keats and the Culture of Dissent sets out to recover the lively and unsettling voices of Keats's poetry, and seeks to trace the complex ways in which his poems responded to and addressed their contemporary world. It offers new research about Keats's early life opening valuable new perspectives on his poetry. Two chapters explore the dissenting culture of Enfield School, showing how the school exercised a strong influence on Keats's imaginative life and his political radicalism. Imagination and politics intertwine through succeeding chapters on Keats's friendship with Charles Cowden Clarke; his medical career; the `Cockney' milieu in which Keats's poems were written; and on the immediate controversial impact of his three collections of poetry. The author deftly reconstructs contexts and contemporary resonances for Keats's poems, retrieving the vigorous challenges of Keats's verbal art which outraged his early readers but which was lost to us as Keats entered the canon of English romantic poets.

From inside the book

Contents

HISTORY CLASSICS
51
KEATS AND CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE
88
THE POETRY
111
SONGS FROM THE WOODS
134
THE PHARMACOPOLITICAL POET
160
THE PHARMACY
182
Effigies of Pain
191
POEMS ENDYMION
202
A Time when Pan is not Sought
208
JOHN KEATSS
230
Correspondence Relating to the Cockney
268
INDEX
293
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1998)

Nicholas Roe is at University of St Andrews.

Bibliographic information