This essay considers Keats’s unique appeal to the New Critics of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. It returns to a landmark in American literary studies—Cleanth Brooks’s study of Keats’s "Ode on a Grecian Urn"—drawing on Brooks’s unpublished personal and professional papers to place his work in the context of mid-century disciplinary and methodological changes. At a time when greater access to American higher education created what we might call a “classroom public” for poetry, Brooks’s study of Keats advocates for and models the close, collective reading of poetry, idealistically figuring the university classroom as a site of social inclusion while also summoning the conservative historical fantasies associated with Southern Agrarianism.