Why Read Keats?

Abstract

This chapter interrogates the challenges for new readers of poetry, and in particular of Keats’s poetry, of understanding and appreciating the special nature of Keats’s appeal and achievement. It considers those aspects of Keats’s poetry which can be difficult for new readers, including the reflexive nature of Keats’s thematic preoccupations: his concern with his own development as a poet, and with the place of poetry in human experience generally. Keats’s poetry can seem to be isolated from real experience in taking as its main theme the idea of poetry itself, rather than directing its attention out to matters such as personal emotion, society, and history. These issues are explored through a reading of ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’. There is then an overview of the three interlocking central concerns of the poetry: the relationship between identity and change, personal, literary, and historical.