This book considers Keats s major poems as exercises in Romantic historicism. The poetry s rich allusiveness represents Keats s effort to reclaim the British canon for Cockney revisionism, and reveals Keats characteristically invoking the past to define his contemporary cultural politics. The book begins by discussing Keats s Cockney traditionalism in its Regency context and then proceeds through the poet s career in chronological order. There are chapters on history and vocation in the poet s first volume, the failed idealism of 'Endymion', gender and audience in the Medieval Romances, the...