ROBERTSON by John Keats: Summary, Meaning & Analysis
This text isn't a poem by John Keats; it's a publisher's imprint — the bibliographic details that appear on the title page or colophon of a book published by Oxford University Press at the Clarendon Press in 1909, almost a century after Keats passed away.
The poem
Oxford At the Clarendon Press 1909
This text isn't a poem by John Keats; it's a publisher's imprint — the bibliographic details that appear on the title page or colophon of a book published by Oxford University Press at the Clarendon Press in 1909, almost a century after Keats passed away. There's no poem to analyze here, just three lines indicating the place of publication, the press, and the year. To conduct a meaningful analysis, we would need the complete text of a poem.
Line-by-line
Oxford / At the Clarendon Press / 1909
Tone & mood
No tone can be identified since there’s no poem included. The text provided is a bibliographic imprint.
Symbols & metaphors
- Clarendon Press imprint — Signals a scholarly or authoritative publication — but this is a straightforward fact about publishing, not a poetic symbol.
- 1909 — The year the book was published, about 88 years after Keats died in 1821, relates to its editorial history rather than to any specific poem.
- Oxford — The city where the work was published. Oxford does show up in Keats's writings (he visited in 1817), but we can't establish that link here without referencing a specific poem.
Historical context
John Keats (1795–1821) stood out as a key figure in English Romanticism, celebrated for his odes like "Ode to a Nightingale" and "To Autumn." He passed away from tuberculosis at just 25 years old. The Clarendon Press, which was established in Oxford during the 17th century, became a prominent publisher of scholarly editions of English literature. By 1909, it was releasing authoritative collected works of Romantic poets, including Keats. The text provided here seems to be the imprint page from one of these editions—likely E. de Sélincourt's 1905/1909 collection of Keats's poems—rather than a poem itself. Without the actual text of a poem, there's no room for literary analysis.
FAQ
There isn't a poem titled 'Robertson' in the recognized works of Keats. This name doesn't show up as a title in any significant scholarly edition of his writings. It might relate to someone mentioned in a letter or a lesser-known piece, but the text provided is just a publisher's imprint, not an actual poem.
The Clarendon Press is the academic imprint of Oxford University Press, named after the Earl of Clarendon, who contributed funds for its establishment in the 17th century. By the early 20th century, it had become the preferred publisher for scholarly editions of English literature.
Keats passed away in 1821, yet editors and publishers kept gathering, annotating, and reprinting his work for many years after. The year 1909 simply marks when a specific edition of his poems was released — it doesn’t indicate when the poems were originally written.
Not in any honest way. Literary analysis relies on the poem's actual words — its imagery, rhythm, argument, and structure. Without those, any 'analysis' would be fabricated instead of observed.
Check Project Gutenberg, the Keats-Shelley Journal, or a library's Clarendon Press edition of Keats's complete poems. If 'Robertson' is a minor work or misattributed, the Oxford English Texts edition edited by Jack Stillinger is the best scholarly resource available.
It's possible. The title 'Robertson' doesn't correspond to any of John Keats's known works. This text might actually come from another piece, or the title field could have been populated with metadata from the book's cover instead of an actual poem title.
Paste the full text of the poem into your query. Once I have the actual lines, I can provide a detailed analysis of the tone, imagery, themes, and historical context.