A Greeting of the Spirit: Selected Poetry of John Keats with Commentaries

Seventy-eight pieces of John Keats’s writing are given careful consideration in this mostly solid introduction to his work from Wolfson (Reading John Keats), an English professor at Princeton. Keats “writes with an extraordinary sensitivity” and “exquisite technical skill,” she notes, and to shed light on his “ways of imagining and writing poetry,” Wolfson reproduces the text of a poem, provides some historical context, then offers her critical reflection. She finds in “Endymion” “a stage he sets for poetic self-realization,” while “The Eve of St. Agnes” is by turns “campy, satirical, ironic, and reality-minded,” and, of Keats’s three best-known poems, she reflects: “Ode to a Nightingale leaves no lesson; Ode on a Grecian Urn ironizes its lesson. Ode on Melancholy is a lesson with a vengeance.” While some might find Wolfson’s prose difficult to parse (“The most important contest is between the static spatial array of the visual object and the temporal arc of the poet’s language”), those willing to stay the course will find plenty of insight. This is a spirited companion to Lucasta Miller’s recent Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph. (Oct.)