Keats's Boyish Imagination

Marggraf Turley, Richard, Keats's Boyish Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2003) RAE2008

For many readers, John Keats's achievement is to have attainted a supreme poetic maturity at so young an age. Canonical poems of resignation and acceptance such as 'To Autumn' are traditionally seen as examples par excellence of this maturity. In this highly innovative study, however, Marggraf Turley examines how, for Keats, an insistence on 'boyishness' in the midst of apparent mature imagery is the very essence of his political contestation of the literary establishment.