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Keats the Poet
Stuart M. Sperry
A landmark of Keats scholarship, and one of those critical books that quietly reorganized a field. Writing in 1973, Stuart Sperry set out to give the wealth of fine close readings of Keats a real organizing frame — and found it in the poet's own preoccupations: sensation, process, and a deep, productive uncertainty he called indeterminacy. Chapter by chapter he moves through the career, from Endymion to the great odes to the unfinished Hyperion, tracing how Keats thought about the making of poetry itself, often in the language of chemistry, the science he had trained in. Learned but lucid, it is a book for anyone who wants to understand not just what Keats wrote but how his mind worked.
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The author
Stuart M. Sperry (1929–2010) was a professor of English at Indiana University and an important figure in the twentieth-century revival of serious attention to the British Romantics. He wrote as a scholar's scholar, but with a real feel for the inner workings of poems.
The book
First published by Princeton University Press in 1973 (this copy carries a later afterword). Its organizing idea is that Keats's poetry is centrally about process and "indeterminacy" — the poet's willingness to remain in uncertainty, his famous "negative capability" — and Sperry reads the whole career, from Endymion through the 1819 odes to The Fall of Hyperion and "To Autumn," in that light. A recurring thread is Keats's habit of imagining creation in the language of chemistry, the science he had studied as an apothecary-surgeon.
How it has aged
Exceptionally well: it is still cited as a foundational modern study, and later critics — even the most theoretical — tend to trace their sense of Keatsian indeterminacy back to Sperry. A standard on the Keats shelf.
For more context
Walter Jackson Bate's biography John Keats; and Keats's own letters, where "negative capability" is first named.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Stuart M. Sperry
- Publisher
- Princeton University Press
- Place of publication
- Princeton, New Jersey
- Year
- 1973
- Edition
- With a new afterword
- ISBN
- 0-691-00089-1
- Format
- Paperback
- Shelf
- Poetry
- Location
- Maine