On Keats’s Practice and Poetics of Responsibility

This accessible, informed, and engaging book offers fresh, new avenues into Keats’s poems and letters, including a valuable introduction to “the responsible poet.” Focusing on Keats’s sense of responsibility to truth, poetry, and the reader, G. Douglas Atkins, a noted T.S. Eliot critic, writes as an ama- teur. He reads the letters as literary texts, essayistic and dramatic; the Odes in comparison with Eliot’s treatment of similar subjects; “The Eve of St. Agnes” by adding to his respected earlie