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‘The End and Aim of Poesy’: Keats and Shelley in Dialogue

  • Michael O’NeillEmail author
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Abstract

Keats completed Sleep and Poetry at the end of 1816, at about the time that he and Percy Shelley first met; in hindsight, Michael O’Neill argues, the poem reads as an opening statement in a dialogue about the purposes of poetry that developed between the two men. O’Neill’s chapter reassesses the inception and development of Keats’s and Shelley’s literary relations, treating ‘place’ as an imaginative site of literary encounter. It argues that each poet read the other’s work with meticulous attention, as is evident from an array of echoes and references. O’Neill concludes with a discussion of Keats’s presence—that is, the place of Keats—in Shelley’s later work.

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Copyright information

© The Author(s) 2018

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of English StudiesDurham UniversityDurhamUK

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