Degree Name

MA (Master of Arts)

Program

English

Date of Award

5-2016

Committee Chair or Co-Chairs

Jesse Graves

Committee Members

Jesse Graves, Don Johnson, Robert Sawyer

Abstract

While John Keats never traveled to America and only wrote a handful of admittedly hostile lines about it in his poetry, American writers and readers have consistently regarded Keats as one of the greatest and most influential poets of the past two centuries. His critical reputation in America has been stable since the 1840s, enduring throughout changing tastes and movements, and his biography and work have been utilized in manifold appropriations by American poets and writers. I examine Keats’s attitude toward the United States—which was in conflict with the general feeling regarding the country by his fellow Romantic poets—and briefly review the American reception of Keats’s poetry in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries before considering quintessential appropriations of Keats and the Keats biography in works by three American poets: Amy Clampitt, Stanley Plumly, and B.H. Fairchild.

Document Type

Thesis - unrestricted

Copyright

Copyright by the authors.

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