UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Bicentennial Essays on Keats

Book Jacket: "The Persistence of Poetry" edited by R.M. Ryan and R.A. Sharp

Edited by Robert M. Ryan and Ronald A. Sharp

A major reassessment of Keats’s literary legacy by leading scholars in the field

If, as George Gissing once wrote, "to like Keats is a test of fitness for understanding poetry," then the essays collected in this volume suggest that literary criticism remains a lively and vigorous endeavor. Written by a broad range of prominent scholars—senior Romanticists as well as younger critics and major poets—the essays offer a fresh reevaluation of the nature and importance of John Keats's achievement. The idealistic aesthete or humanistic hero admired by earlier generations of readers develops into a much richer, more complex image of the poet. The product of a continuing critical dialogue, this new Keats attests not only to his own enduring appeal but to the persistent vitality of poetry itself amid the distractions of a fragmented postmodern culture.

An introduction by Robert M. Ryan reviews the history of Keats scholarship, situating new critical assessments by M. H. Abrams, Walter Jackson Bate, Eavan Boland, David Bromwich, Hermione de Almeida, Terence Alan Hoagwood, Elizabeth Jones, Debbie Lee, Philip Levine, Donald H. Reiman, Ronald A. Sharp, George Steiner, Jack Stillinger, Aileen Ward, and Susan Wolfson.

"The bicentennial of Keats's birth was an occasion for scholars to reflect on the history of Keats's reputation, on the qualities essential to Keats's worth and appeal, and on future directions in Keats studies. The essays gathered in this volume represent some of the best of such thoughtful and far-ranging meditations. . . . This is a unique and valuable collection."

Beth Lau, author of Keats's Reading of the Romantic Poets

Robert M. Ryan is professor of English at Rutgers University, Camden. His books include Keats: The Religious Sense and The Romantic Reformation.

Ronald A. Sharp is John Crowe Ransom Professor of English and associate provost at Kenyon College. He is author of Keats, Skepticism, and the Religion of Beauty and editor, with Eudora Welty, of The Norton Book of Friendship.

Literary Studies
232 pp.
LC 98-7840
$40.00s cloth, ISBN 1-55849-175-9
1998

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