John Keats became almost as admired and studied as his poetry, and are highly regarded within the canon of English literary correspondence. T. S. Eliot described them as "certainly the most notable and most important ever written by any English poet." Keats spent a great deal of time considering poetry itself, its constructs and impacts, displaying a deep interest unusual amongst his milieu who were more easily distracted by metaphysics or politics, fashions or science. Eliot wrote of Keats' conclusions; "There is hardly one statement of Keats' about poetry which ... will not be found to be true, and what is more,
Peter McDonald (critic) Peter McDonald (critic) Professor Peter McDonald (born 1962 in Belfast) is a poet, university lecturer and writer of literary criticism. He holds the post of Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in the English Language at Christ Church, a college of the University of Oxford (and where the term "Student" is used for what elsewhere would be termed a "Fellow"). McDonald was educated at Methodist College, Belfast, and University College, Oxford. He has been writing poetry since his teens, and was the winner of national young poet competitions in 1978 and 1979. His first published poems were collected in