Occasioned by the spirit of celebrating Keats's 200th birthday (31 October 1995), Jeffrey C. Robinson's Reception and Poetics in Keats offers at once a history and readings of the many praise and commemorative poems to or about Keats (collected in an appendix) from the time of his early death up to the present day and a consequent rethinking of Keats's own poems and poetics. Keats emerges as a poet uniquely available and useful to the experimental poets of our own time.

Introduction - A Game of Shards: Keats's 'vitally metaphorical poetry' - Enshrinings: Public Memorials and Keatsian Poetics - Keats Enshrined in Poems: the 19th-century and Traditional Poetics - Readings - Flowers, Keats, and Death - Quoting the Nightingale - Biography and the Poet - Poetry and/as Biography: Amy Clampitt's A Homage to John Keats - Cosmic Biography: Tom Clark's Junkets on a Sad Planet - More Readings: Towards an Open Poetics in Keats: Countee Cullen, Mae Cowdery, Galway Kinnell, Robert Browning - Mark Halliday's 'There: for Keats' and Keats's 'Epistle to J.H. Reynolds, Esq': Against Monumental Poetry - Afterthought to 'There': Keats's 'Ode to Maia' - The Walking Tour of Scotland, 1818: The Play of Poetic Forms - Memos on Keats for the Next Millennium - Appendix: a Selection of Poems Written to or about John Keats: 1821-1994

JEFFREY C. ROBINSON is Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he has taught since 1971. He has published widely on Romantic literature and is known for his experiments with critical styles. His books include Radical Literary Education: a Classroom Experiment with Wordsworth's Ode, The Walk: Notes on a Romantic Image, The Current of Romantic Passion, and Romantic Presences: Living Images from the Age of Wordsworth and Shelley. He has just published a volume of poetry occasioned by the images, discourse, and figures from the Romantic movement, Spliced Romanticism.