Keats and Me.

Starting from Speed Hill's whimsical and ahistorical notion that authors and editors intuitively choose one another, this brief essay traces Keats's and my interactions over the past six decades in Austin, Texas, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Urbana, Illinois. For me, it is a story of old-fashioned biographical approach to literary study succeeded by New Critical slow reading that is then sophisticated (perhaps also muddled) by the addition of several types of literary theory. For Keats (who once, in a marginal scrawl, posed the question whether criticism is "a true thing"), it is a story of increasing semantic and textual complexity with, all along, a detached twinkle at the prospect of large numbers of English professors proclaiming definitive interpretations of his poems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]