John Keats in Context ed. by Michael O’Neill (review)

John Keats in Context is the latest in the Literature in Context series from Cambridge University Press, volumes designed to provide comprehensive accounts of the historical, literary, and personal circumstances that inform a writer’s work, as well as evaluations of the lasting effects the work has had. As Michael O’Neill’s concise introduction makes clear, this particular addition to the in Context list takes on the considerable task of reaching both academic and non-academic readers of Keats, even as it recognizes “that he possesses the inexhaustibility of those few writers who are necessary” (2). The volume’s six sections move with readable speed through the poet’s personal history, the development of his intellectual interests and poetic projects, his responses to wider cultural and historical events, his literary influences, and his critical reception from the beginning through the present day. As a wide-ranging but coherent compendium of ongoing scholarly conversations addressing all of these topics, the book will be indispensable to Keats scholars for years to come.

Part One, “Life, Letters, Texts,” begins with Sarah Wootten’s straightforward account of how biographies and films must face a “Keats of creative contingencies” whose multiplicities “run counter to more traditional forms of life writing” (15). Wootten is on to something with this insight, not just about biographical engagements with Keats but about how the figurations of his poems and letters set in motion uncountable readerly imaginings. The seven chapters that follow in the section contend with that challenge by viewing the poet through different but connected lenses, making a strong case that any division between Keats’s lived experiences and his writings must be viewed as an arbitrary imposition. Thus John Barnard’s thorough recounting of Keats’s publishing history—while Keats was alive and after—dovetails with other historical considerations in the section as well as with more conceptually driven essays such as Shahidha Bari’s thoughtful discussion of Keatsian “Mortality” and Madeleine Callaghan on the letters. Part Two, “Cultural Contexts,” widens the book’s scope to include a revaluation of Keats in the Cockney School, accounts of his life in London’s political and artistic scenes, and, in Anthony John Harding’s final chapter, a consideration of how those experiences shaped Keats’s inheritance of religious and mythological traditions. Parts Three and Four are the lynchpin of the volume, thirteen chapters where personal and poetic contexts (on the one hand) and legacies (on the other) converge. Part Three, “Ideas and Poetics,” brings the history of ideas to bear most squarely on the poems and letters themselves, offering six essays focused on the ways in which Keats’s intellectual dispositions and concepts informed his poetry. Porscha Fermanis’s opening discussion of how Keats imbricated a critique of Enlightenment with an insistence on empirical experience revises our understanding of how the poet engaged various and often competing strains of thought. Fermanis’s essay echoes throughout five following chapters that take on Hazlitt, the poetical character, sense, sensation, imagination, beauty, truth, and, in a concluding chapter that displays Michael O’Neill’s superb close reading skills, Keats’s prosody and versification in the odes. Having given us a primer on the poems themselves, the volume shifts in Part Four, “Poetic Contexts,” to consider how Keats’s engagement with precursors and contemporary influences played out in the multiple genres in which he worked. This section is notable for its distillation—in chapters by Susan Wolfson, Andrew Bennett, and Christopher Miller—of some of the finer recent readings of Keats’s formal innovations. Part Five, “Influence,” extends Keatsian afterlives through the Victorian age and into the twentieth century with readings of Stevens, Bishop, and Heaney, among others. The volume concludes with Part Six, “Critical Reception,” which follows responses to Keats’s poems from contemporary reviews through the present moment.

O’Neill shows a disciplined editorial hand throughout all these sections, dropping in himself from time to time with chapters on prosody, on Keats’s poetic...