Keats's Boyish Imagination

John Keats, famously, is the poet who aspired to, and managed to achieve, a supreme maturity; who progressed from the "namby-pamby" early lyrics to the "calm power" of the great Odes and theHyperionpoems. His "maturity" has become a cornerstone of recent political appraisals of his work. This book explores its subject over a range of poetical and psychological terrain to contend thatimmaturity-- the "Boyish imagination" -- is not only a more appropriate place from which to scrutinize Keats's political consciousness, but is itself the emphatic site of that consciousness. If Keats could deploy puerility purposefully as a system of political interruption, his ambivalent stance towards the forms and functions of adulthood also exacerbated personal anxieties concerning "manly" behavior, finding what he called a "right feeling towards Women", and locating a poetic idiom that would be accepted by "grown-up reading audiences. In a series of profoundly surprising readings, focusing on themessuch as feet and foot-related imagery, the breaking voice and female anatomy, this study of a major canonical figure alerts us to -- and opens a new perspective on -- the rich complexity of Keats the poet, Keats the man.

Richard Marggraf Turley is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.