Reading John Keats

Susan J. Wolfson, Professor of English at Princeton University, New Jersey, is widely published in the fields of English Romanticism and poetic theory, including Keats-inspired sonnets in Literary Imagination (2010) and her books: The Romantics and their Contemporaries (co-edited with Peter Manning, 2010), Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action (2010), John Keats, A Longman Cultural Edition (2007), The Cambridge Companion to John Keats (Cambridge, 2001) and Formal Charges (1997).

• 1. Life and times; 2. Conceiving early poems, and Poems; 3. Falling in love with Endymion, A Poetic Romance. Rereading King Lear; 4. Venturing 'new Romance': Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil. A Story from Boccaccio; 5. Falling with Hyperion; 6. Still romancing: The Eve of St Agnes: a dream-sonnet; La belle dame; 7. Reforming the sonnet and forming the Odes of 1819: Psyche, Nightingale, Grecian Urn, Melancholy, Indolence; 8. Writhing, wreathing, writing Lamia; 9. Falling in fall 1819: The Fall of Hyperion and To Autumn; 10. Last poems and lasting Keats; A few famous formulations; At a glance: Keats in context; Further reading.

'… the book presents a chronological journey through Keats's biographia literaria, a boon for readers of Keats; but Wolfson's attention to reading is also a movable feast, modeling a process that can be transferred to other writers …' John Kandl, Modern Philology