John Keats Without Compass reframes Keats’s work using modern and contemporary avant-garde principles to show that Keats was in fact avant-garde for his time and that many modern poets are actually part of a legacy of radical Romantic poets.

In John Keats Without Compass, Romantics scholar Jeffrey C. Robinson reframes John Keats’s influential theory of “negative capability” by placing his work in conversation with the work of modern experimentalists and thinkers such as Emily Dickinson, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Olson, Robert Grenier, and Rachel DuPlessis. The result shows that Keats was more formally and linguistically radical than some of his contemporaries and that his ideas constitute a radical Romantic poetry lineage that can be seen in the work of contemporary poetry and poetics. This book presents a new way to view both the Romantics and contemporary innovative poetry and will be of interest to scholars and poets alike.