SOURCE: "Reading Keats's Plots," in Critical Essays on John Keats, edited by Hermione de Almeida, G. K. Hall & Co., 1990, pp. 88-102.

In the following essay, Stillinger asserts that poetry should be read as fiction, in the sense that poems have plots, characters, points-of-view, and settings. Stillinger then reviews the several plots of Keats's poetry, arguing that examining the poems as narratives may yield a more complete understanding of them.

A multitude of causes unknown to former times have combined to produce, in the minds of students, teachers, scholars, and English department administrators, a sharp and theoretically unjustifiable distinction between poetry and other forms of fiction. "Fiction" has come to mean exclusively prose fiction, and journals with titles like Modern Fiction Studies and Studies in Short Fiction are universally understood as having to do with novels and short stories. In principle, no one should object to the proposition that...