We read Keats too quickly. I am not referring to the possibility of performing the kind of langorous, indolent reading that a certain Keatsian discourse appears to demand or to the way in which, you might say, there is never enough time for Keats. Nor am I making an unlikely claim about critical attention to the complexities and ambiguities of a poem such as ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. In saying that we read Keats too quickly, I am referring to the way in which we hurry through our reading of what Derrida calls that ‘little, insignificant piece of the whole corpus’, the name. While the name of every author is no doubt transformed by metonymic substitution into his or her writing, I want to suggest that reading John Keats provokes particularly difficult and unavoidable, if unanswerable questions. Keats – his name and renown, his body, writing and life – is multiply inscribed in whatever it is that we think we are doing when we read ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, for example, or ‘Isabella’, or ‘Hyperion’. This chapter concerns the renaming of Keats, his renown.

In the early reviews and commentary on Keats and his poetry, the poet's name was, literally, a site of disturbance and conflict.