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COPYRIGHT 2000 Boston University
Jeffrey C. Robinson. Reception and Poetics in Keats: "My Ended Poet." New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. Pp. 205.
This study of Keats's reception and his poetics is directed less to Keats's critics than to his readers. The reception history looks at three Keatsian legacies: the first a solid and predictable critical tradition in which "a `major Keats poem' is a closed form designed to foreground the heroic resistance of an expansive ego against ... an elegiac combination of desire, longing, and severe loss" (5); the second, a set of shrines in Hampstead, Rome and the Houghton Library at Harvard where Keats lived, died and is buried; and the third, and most important, an avant-garde, modern and postmodern poetic tradition, where, according to Robinson, Keats's "open" poetics have inspired poets from Mallarme and Lorca to Zukofsky, Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe.
Robinson locates the origin of the myth of "Keats the Hero" in James Russell Lowell's introductory essay to his 1854 edition of Keats's work, and he endeavors to show how "a more vital Keatsian poetics" (7) can emerge from some of the most well-worn terms in Keats's letters: the notions of "Negative Capability" and the "camelion poet." Keats's poetry, Robinson contends, becomes a modernist "game of shards" (9) as it registers the pressures placed on subjectivity by the unregulated diversity experienced in a modern, urban print culture. Making a case for...
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