Michael O'Neill, ed. Keats: Bicentenary Readings. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. ISBN: 0-748-608990. Price: £38.

Editor Michael O'Neill suggests at least three rationales for his collection Keats: Bicentenary Readings. First, the eight essays that accompany O'Neill's introduction are offered as a representative sample of the vigorous, wide-ranging critical debates generated during Keats's bicentenary in 1995. Second, the retrospective collection hopes to enable a qualified answer to the difficult question "in what direction is criticism of Keats going?" (2). Third, the essays belong together, O'Neill writes, because despite their heterogeneous approaches and concerns, "the desire to look at, investigate and analyze the different things which Keats's poetry can do and make his readers feel is at the heart" of each (8). As a record of the bicentenary, the collection is a qualified success. All of the essays were originally presented live, six as part of the University of Durham's "Keats Bicentenary Lectures" series. Most retain an engaging immediacy of voice that can be attributed to their original format. Regrettably, none of the essays take a gender-oriented approach, and that omission does a disservice to much fine work. The book does, however, admirably re-enact the debate surrounding one of the most contentious questions to be asked during the bicentenary and since: what had Johnny Keats to do with politics? The question itself has deep roots, stretching back not just to Jerome McGann's important essay "Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism" (Modern Language Notes, 1979) or even to Stopford Brooke's turn of the century declaration that Keats has "no interest in anything but beauty" (Studies in Poetry, 1907, 204). As Susan Wolfson has shown, speculation about Keats's engagement with politics and the other historical particulars of his day runs to the heart of his literary identity as formed by the vitriolic "Cockney School" essays of 1817 and by the aestheticising defensive maneuvers carried out on Keats's behalf by Shelley, Byron, and others sympathetic to the deceased poet. Wherever Keats criticism is going, politics, or, as some would have it, the marked absence of politics, is central to where it has been. Appropriately, these essays split between aesthetic treatments that find politics and history largely intrusive or irrelevant to Keats's art and historicizing readings that attempt to retrieve the material and ideological contexts within and against which the artist worked. O'Neill's desire to stabilize the book by gathering its parts under some overarching umbrella is understandable, but his humanist and formalist commitment to explicating what the poetry can do and how it affects its readers is only central to most, not all, of the essays. If a unifying theme is required, a more accurate one might be this: each of these essays challenges either Jerome McGann's contention that Keats's poetry serves as a form of escape or Marjorie Levinson's contention that Keats's inferior education engendered masturbatory stylistic badness that marks his bourgeois desire for cultural inclusion. J.R. Watson, Gareth Reeves, and O'Neill offer essays that are indeed readings of Keats himself. Building on seminal books by Walter Jackson Bate (1963), Christopher Ricks (1974), Helen Vendler (1983) and John Barnard (1987) among others, these contributors figure Keats as an acutely sensitive hero whose life and work exemplify humanist ideals. Watson uses Nina Coltart's psychoanalytic engagements with "silent patients" to frame Keats's personal and poetic exploration of linguistic thresholds. Reeves eschews "the essentially English debate about [Keats's] social standing," preferring instead to train his attention on the "inward Keats" whose poetic self-consciousness becomes an important model for the habitually self-reflexive American poet Wallace Stevens. O'Neill finds in Keats's nagging ambivalence toward art, an ambivalence haunted by the prospect that poetry itself might prove empty …