Keats’s Anatomy of Melancholy is both a fine book and a fitting tribute to the 1820 volume, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems, published as it is two hundred years after the collection it commemorates and does such a scrupulous job of examining. [...] White combines a bibliographic approach with close reading... The result is an engaging and erudite book, which helped me see the final published volume of verse and many of its poems in a fresh light.
- Matthew Ward, University of Birmingham, Romanticism
As the most in-depth study to date of The Anatomy of Melancholy as an important intertext for Keats’s 1819 poetry; of the Lamia volume as a unified whole; and of the pervasiveness of sorrow and mental suffering in Keats’s work, White’s book makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on the poet.
- Beth Lau, California State University, European Romantic Review
White makes a very convincing case that ought to alter the way these poems are read in the future [...] Keats’s Anatomy of Melancholy makes a compelling case for understanding Burton’s book as part of a multifarious dialogue that provoked some of Keats’s deepest reflections on the creativity and pathology of the imagination (and their inter-relation). [...] Deeply attentive to Keats’s own attention to the words on the page, it shows how Burton’s words could spark with the poet’s own powder trails of thought to provide one of the great firework displays of the period’s poetry.
- Jon Mee, University of York, The Keats-Shelley Review
White’s groundbreaking book combines two exceptional dimensions of Keats’s career into one compelling argument: the genius of the 1820 collection and the significance of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy for Keats’s poetry. White goes where noone has gone before: he unravels and decodes the marvellous pyrotechnics of Burton’s proto-psychological medical text into a deepened, enhanced understanding of Keats’s final collection.
- Heidi Thomson, Victoria University of Wellington,