Publication Detail

This is an iconoclastic view of Keats. Levinson concentrates on the excesses of Keats poetry, the overwritten and cloying sentiment which the majority of modern critics have chosen to ignore or explain away. She takes as her cue for this the uncompromising criticisms levelled against Keats by his contemporaries, Byron, Wordsworth and Hazlitt, all of whom deprecated his indulgence and immaturity. But it is precisely these qualities that make for his originality and whose characteristics the book explores by taking a Derridean approach to the social and personal ambiguities ...more