"John Keats's "The Eve of St. Agnes" is one of the most admired works in standard English poetry. It has had hundreds of thousands of readers - therefore hundreds of thousands of individual responses - since its first publication in 1820. In Reading "The Eve of St. Agnes," Jack Stillinger examines the continuous inexhaustibility of this one poem, theorizing about the reading process, the nature and whereabouts of "meaning" in complex works, and the connection between multiple meanings and canonical status in literature."--BOOK JACKET.