“No one can question the eminency, in Keats's poetry, of the quality of sensuousness.” John Keats's reputation as the most sensuous of British Romantic poets – next to Spenser, perhaps, England's most richly sensuous poet – has proved resilient in the years since Matthew Arnold made this pronouncement more than a century ago. My aim in the present chapter is to re-open the familiar case of Keats's “sensuousness.” In doing so, however, I wish to show how insistently Keats's writing complicates this characterization of his work. For while regularly identified with a sensuous poetic style, Keats often describes his poetry as being most closely associated not with the senses but rather with the faculty of abstraction. In a surprising number of instances, Keats's appeals to sensation remain just that: appeals self-consciously issued from the perspective of a deferred or denied sensuous immediacy.