Robinson's Reception and Poetics in Keats offers at once a history and readings of the many praise and commemorative poems to or about Keats (collected in an appendix) from the time of his early death up to the present day and a consequent rethinking of Keats's own poems and poetics.

Introduction - A Game of Shards: Keats's 'vitally metaphorical poetry' - Enshrinings: Public Memorials and Keatsian Poetics - Keats Enshrined in Poems: the 19th-century and Traditional Poetics - Readings - Flowers, Keats, and Death - Quoting the Nightingale - Biography and the Poet - Poetry and/as Biography: Amy Clampitt's A Homage to John Keats - Cosmic Biography: Tom Clark's Junkets on a Sad Planet - More Readings: Towards an Open Poetics in Keats: Countee Cullen, Mae Cowdery, Galway Kinnell, Robert Browning - Mark Halliday's 'There: for Keats' and Keats's 'Epistle to J.H. Reynolds, Esq': Against Monumental Poetry - Afterthought to 'There': Keats's 'Ode to Maia' - The Walking Tour of Scotland, 1818: The Play of Poetic Forms - Memos on Keats for the Next Millennium - Appendix: a Selection of Poems Written to or about John Keats: 1821-1994

'...Jeffrey Robinson devotes his efforts to dislodging Keats from the nineteenth century cultural milieu that defined his identity as a poet...Robinson is well read in the poetry of his own generation, in English and in other languages, and he uses this experience effectively as he considers the resonance of Keats in contemporary poetic practice...The book provides a valuable service...Intending to emphasize the highly volatile nature of reading an duse of evidence he employs a collage format-with quick shifts of focus, content, even texture and genre...I myself found (to my surprise - the journey exhilarating...Robinson belongs to no school; he has excused himself from discipleship. Eschewing the criticism that barters poetry for life and poetry for history (90), he has written a freshly inquisitive approach to central...critical questions...Robinson is feeling his way toward a radically new understanding of Keats...This book could signal a new era in Keats studies.' - Robert M. Ryan, The Wordsworth Circle