© Columbia University Press
John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment
December, 2009
Cloth, 272 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-7486-3780-5
Edinburgh University Press
$90.00
John Keats is considered to be the least intellectually sophisticated of all the major Romantic poets, but he was a more serious thinker than either his contemporaries or later scholars have acknowledged. This innovative study provides a major reassessment of Keats's intellectual life by considering his often overlooked engagement with a formidable body of eighteenth-century thought, from the work of such historians as Robertson and Gibbon to philosophers such as Hume, Smith, and Voltaire. The book re-examines some of Keats's most important poems, including "The Eve of St Agnes," "Hyperion," "Ode to Psyche," and "Lamia," in light of a range of eighteenth-century ideas and contexts, from literary history and cultural progress to anthropology, economics, and political theory. By demonstrating that the language and ideas of the Enlightenment played a key role in his poetic agenda, Keats's poetry is shown to be less the expression of an intuitive boy genius and more the product of the cultural and intellectual contexts of his time. The combination of historical context and textual analysis makes this book of interest to students of cultural and intellectual history, as well as to literary scholars.