Written by a broad range of prominent scholars - senior Romanticists as well as younger critics and major poets - the essays offer a fresh reevaluation of the nature and importance of John Keats's achievement. The idealistic aesthete or humanistic hero admired by earlier generations of readers develops into a much richer, more complex image of the poet.

The product of a continuing critical dialogue, this new Keats attests not only to his own enduring appeal but also to the persistent vitality of poetry itself amid the distractions of a fragmented postmodern culture.