Themes of imagination and politics intertwine in this book, which aims to recover the unsettling voices of Keats's poetry, and trace the ways in which his poems responded to and addressed their contemporary world. It researches Keats's early life and the dissenting culture of Enfield School.

Keats and the Culture of Dissent sets out to recover the lively and unsettling voices of Keats's poetry, and seeks to trace the complex ways in which his poems responded to and addressed their contemporary world. It offers new research about Keats's early life opening valuable new perspectives on his poetry. Two chapters explore the dissenting culture of Enfield School, showing how the school exercised a strong influence on Keats's imaginative life and his political radicalism. Imagination and politics intertwine through succeeding chapters on Keats's friendship with Charles Cowden Clarke; his medical career; the 'Cockney' milieu in which Keats's poems were written; and on the immediate controversial impact of his three collections of poetry. The author deftly reconstructs contexts and contemporary resonances for Keats's poems, retrieving the vigorous challenges of Keats's verbal art which outraged his early readers but which was lost to us as Keats entered the canon of English romantic poets.

Introduction: John Keats in the Cockney School
1. A Cockney Classroom: Keats and the Culture of Dissent
2. Cosmopolitics: History, Classics, and Pretty Paganism
3. Keats and Charles Cowden Clarke
4. 'Soft humanity put on': The Poetry and Politics of Sociality 1798-1818
5. Songs from the Woods
or, Outlaw Lyrics
6. The Pharmacopolitical Poet
7. 'Apollo's touch': The Pharmacy of Imagination
8. Lisping Sedition: Poems, Endymion, and the Poetics of Dissent
Epilogue: John Keats's Commonwealth: The 1820 Collection and 'To Autumn'
Appendix: Correspondence Relating to the 'Cockney School' Essays
Bibliography
Index