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Pederson-Krag's little book, The Lurking Keats, continues her longstanding interest in that poet.1 In the preface, she writes, "By correlating [Keats's] verses with his emotional development, I hope to demonstrate that Keats brought into being a secondary identity, antithetical to this ostensible personality … in which his genius took form and flowered" (p. i.).
Her method is to intertwine, in the course of a long narrative account of the poet's life, actual biographical facts and snippets of Keats's poetry. She takes the latter mostly at face value, as though they can be viewed as direct associations. This constitutes a serious methodological flaw. It is compounded by the lack of any explanation by the author of the origin of her organizing concepts of "the lurking Keats" and "the ostensible Keats," which she uses as roughly equal to "reconstructed narrator" and "real person."
Pederson-Krag makes bold assumptions about the latent content of various poems, without offering us any evidence for her conclusions. For