Reweaving the tapestry of intertextuality. Keats’s dialogue with Shakespeare and the Italian translations of When I Have Fears

This essay takes a contrastive approach to the expediency of an intertextual approach to Keats’s poetry and his thinking about the nature of poetry. Keats, it is argued, becomes ‘indissolubly united’ to his predecessors, and such intertextual relations are explored in relation to Harold Bloom’s ideas of poetic influence, Keats’s creative responses to Shakespeare, and further developed through an exploration of intertextuality and translation. The essa­y concludes with a detailed account of Italian translations of Keats’s poetry.