Keats's Reading of the Romantic Poets

Keats’s Reading of the Romantic Poets offers the first comprehensive analysis of Keats’s familiarity with the works of his most famous contemporaries: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley. Beth Lau considers a variety of questions: which volumes and individual poems Keats read, what editions he used, when he read them, where he might have acquired copies, and why he read and responded as he did to certain works at particular periods of his life. The book presents a complex, detailed portrait of Keats’s intellectual relationships with the major poets of his age.This study situates Keats in the literary climate of his time and provides Keats scholars with a reliable record that may assist future intertextual, influence, biographical, or critical studies. While previous work has concentrated on Keats’s debt to Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, and other great Renaissance and Medieval writers, the most significant influences on a poet’s style and outlook are generally contemporary sources. In fact, Keats’s very interest in Renaissance and Medieval poetry and drama was a taste he shared with his age. Keats’s Reading of the Romantic Poets, in laying the groundwork for a new examination of the poet in relation to the literature of his time, helps us to see the Romantic poets as a genuine literary group that read and responded to one another’s works.Each chapter contains an essay and checklists that conveniently organize information on Keats’s familiarity with each of the other poets’ publications. The checklists also distinguish reliable evidence — direct references and quotations, items in Keats’s library, and statements by people who knew Keats — from more conjectural echoes and allusions. The essays draw conclusions from the information presented in the checklists and consider other types of evidence that do not lend themselves to a checklist format. One source of such evidence is the libraries and literary tastes of Keats’s friends: people like Charles Cowden Clarke, Leigh Hunt, Benjamin Robert Haydon, John Hamilton Reynolds, Benjamin Bailey, and William Hazlitt, who were influential in shaping Keats’s opinions about literature. In fact, the book may be considered a study of two levels in Keats’s relationship to his contemporaries: his literary relationships with the major poets of his day, and his personal interactions with an immediate circle that helped stimulate and focus his reading and thinking about poetry.Keats’s Reading of the Romantic Poets is an important reference work for scholars and critics interested in Keats, in the connections among the major poets of the early nineteenth century, and in biography and social history. The book’s clear, jargon-free prose makes it accessible to a variety of students and scholars.