About the lecture

Although Keats never went to university, he was nevertheless a voracious reader. He was said to have read every book in his school library, while he himself boasted of having read Shakespeare’s Hamlet more than forty times. According to a school friend, he “ramped through” Spenser’s Faerie Queene “like a young horse into a Spring meadow”, while he also found time to read Homer, Virgil, Milton, Tasso, and many other authors in the literary canon. In this module, we think about Keats as a reader, focusing in particular on his poems ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ and ‘Hyperion’.

About the lecturer

Ross Wilson was born in Salford and brought up in north Manchester, where he attended Philips High School and Bury College. He was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and University College London before completing his doctorate at Cambridge in 2004. He held a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel (2004-7) and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the Faculty of English, Cambridge (2007-9) before being appointed to a lectureship in Literature in the School of Literature, Drama, and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2009. He returned to Cambridge in 2013 as Lecturer in Criticism in the Faculty of English and took up a fellowship at Trinity College. He is editor of Romantic Circles Reviews & Receptions and very occasionally tweets @RossWilso . In 2015-16 he is the Crausaz Wordsworth Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities.