The Persistence of Poetry
Bicentennial Essays on Keats
Edited by Robert M. Ryan and Ronald A. Sharp
University of Massachusetts Press
If, as George Gissing once wrote, "to like Keats is a test of fitness for understanding poetry," than the essays collected in this volume suggest that literary criticism remains a lively and vigorous endeavor. Written by a broad range of prominent scholars—Senior Romanticists as well as younger critics and major poets—the essays offer a fresh reevaluation of the nature and importance of John Keats's achievement. The idealistic aesthete or humanistic hero admired by earlier generations of readers develops into a much richer, more complex image of the poet. The product of a continuing critical dialogue, this new Keats attests not only to his own enduring appeal but also to the persistent vitality of poetry itself amid the distractions of a fragmented postmodern culture.
An introduction by Robert M. Ryan reviews the history of Keats scholarship, situating new critical assessments by M. H. Abrams, Walter Jackson Bate, Eavan Boland, David Bromwich, Hermione de Almeida, Terence Alan Hoagwood, Elizabeth Jones, Debbie Lee, Philip Levine, Donald H. Reiman, Ronald A Sharp, George Steiner, Jack Stillinger, Aileen Ward, and Susan Wolfson.
An introduction by Robert M. Ryan reviews the history of Keats scholarship, situating new critical assessments by M. H. Abrams, Walter Jackson Bate, Eavan Boland, David Bromwich, Hermione de Almeida, Terence Alan Hoagwood, Elizabeth Jones, Debbie Lee, Philip Levine, Donald H. Reiman, Ronald A Sharp, George Steiner, Jack Stillinger, Aileen Ward, and Susan Wolfson.
The bicentennial of Keats's birth was an occasion for scholars to reflect on the history of Keats's reputation, on the qualities essential to Keats's worth and appeal, and on future directions in Keats studies. The essays gathered in this volume represent some of the best of such thoughtful and far-ranging meditations'¦This is a unique and valuable collection.'—Beth Lau, Author of Keats's Reading of the Romantic Poets
'Keats is useful, generation after generation, because he possessed an uncanny 'compositional bravery,' an attention to the buildup of sonic details which allied him to his predecessors in a poetic tradition and separated him from them (Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth) by his personal signature of incremental detail which crystallized a uniquely inspired truth of rigorous resonance'¦That so many salient literary critics, literary historians, and poets can return to Keats as an abiding spring for fresh space and nourishment is the value of The Persistence of Poetry, a landmark collaboration in honor and recognition of a bard whose artistry is still beyond us.'—Michael S. Harper, Brown University
Robert M. Ryan is professor of English at Rutgers University, Camden. His books include Keats: The Religious Sense and The Romantic Reformation.Ronald A. Sharp is John Crowe Ransom Professor of English and associate provost at Kenyon College. He is author of Keats, Skepticism, and the Religion of Beauty and editor, with Eudora Welty, of The Norton Book of Friendship.
