Romantic poets and contemporary poetry literary reception as involving a “willing suspension of disbelief” (in Coleridge’s famous phrase); the uncanny idea that, as Shelley argues in his A Defence of Poetry, poetry makes the familiar strange; and, perhaps most importantly, the equally uncanny possibility that what is most powerful and strange, most powerfully strange, about poetry is that it is just the crafted deployment of “ordinary” language – that poetry is a “selection of the language”, as Wordsworth puts it, “really used by men.”6 But if Romanticism is, therefore, often in only vaguely defined and barely acknowledged ways, part of the “air we breathe,” part of the way that we conceive of poetry, it is also more directly and more explicitly a source of poetic material And one of the most interesting ways that readers, critics, and poets have directly engaged with Romantic poetry over recent decades has been to blur the distinction between writer and writing, between poet and poem One way to approach the question of the significance of Romantic poetry in contemporary culture is to examine the often rather contradictory ways in which contemporary poets directly express their interest in, as well as their distance from and resistance to, the lives as well as the work of their eminent predecessors John Keats’s afterlives John Keats is the Romantic poet who is perhaps most often and most intimately evoked by contemporary poets, just as it was Keats, along with Shelley, who was most often mourned and memorialized in nineteenthcentury poems.7 And what is most striking about contemporary evocations of Keats is the intensity with which they often figure a particular kind of affiliation and even personal identification, however guarded, with the youthful poet “I think I half believed I was him,” Anne Stevenson comments of her first encounter with the poet’s work in Miss McKinney’s twelfth grade English class in 1950, in “John Keats, 1821–1950” (2000).8 Although the American writer Constance Urdang declares in her poem “Keats’ (1990) that “It isn’t Keats I love but the incorruptible / Purity of his words,”9 contemporary poets tend nevertheless to recall Keats on account of his tragically curtailed life as much as on account of his writing, or of what Tom Clark calls his “intense language drive.”10 Keats’s life, of course, lends itself to retelling on account of the way that it constitutes a particular kind of “allegory”11 – the allegory of the fate of poetic genius and the poet’s suffering, neglect, and necessarily early death Keats instantiates, in other words, the very being of the poet or at least a certain archetype or ideal of the poet that we have inherited and in some ways still cling to, albeit in somewhat attenuated form: what we have inherited from Keats and others is one of the dominant senses 265 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008