Balm Upon the World: A John Keats Outreach Project

The essay describes a service-learning project that requires advanced undergraduates to identify, contact, and serve a local constituency that would benefit from reading John Keats’s work with one or more newly minted “experts.” Anchored in Keats’s “Fall of Hyperion” assertion that a genuine poet “pours out a balm upon the world,” the project requires students in a semester-long John Keats seminar to become public humanists themselves, and in addition to describing the special affinity between Keats’s values and public-humanities endeavors, the essay details the service assignment’s logic and typical outcomes. Appendices include a copy of the assignment guidelines and an excerpt from one student’s project.