Would you like the chance to view the original handwriting and corrections on famous works marked by one of the greatest poets in English literature?

About 250 teachers, scholars and enthusiasts of John Keats attended an exhibition and three-day international conference at Houghton Library last week to do just that.

The conference, which ended last weekend, celebrated the bicentennial of Keats' birth. The exhibition, however, is still showing.

"This was a historic conference," said Dennis C. Marnon, administrative officer of Houghton Library. "The first of its kind ever devoted exclusively to the study of John Keats, this was also the first time that Houghton Library had sponsored a conference of this size devoted exclusively to the study of one author's work."

The conference featured panels, poetry readings, paper presentations and discussions of Keats and his legacy.

"We had so many famous names representing the last quarter century of Keats studies that the audience was enraptured by all of the presentations, particularly lively discussions that followed the presentation in which poet laureate Robert Hass spoke," Marnon said.

Staff members of Houghton Library said the sessions were well attended and popular, especially a session on "Keats and the Art of Poetry."

Leslie A. Morris, the curator of manuscripts at Houghton, described the session as "poets talking about poetry."

She said Hass spoke in that panel about how most of Keats' later poems were never equalled by later artists, so it is "therefore intimidating to poets who cannot call themselves Keatsian without believing that they will fail to measure up to his standard."

A Harvard professor who chaired a panel called "The Art of Teaching Keats" said she found it valuable to listen to the papers of other scholars.

"You never come away from the exposure to the views of others with-out having your own mind stimulated and sometimes changed," said University Professor Helen H. Vendler, who teaches Keats as part of English 10, a required survey class on British literature.

"[As a result of the conference] I was brought to think more about Keats' political and aesthetic principles and also about his constant echoing of Shakespeare," she said. "I think it's always important to remind ourselves why poets like Keats remain perpetual objects of studies for so many centuries, and the conference does just that."

The keynote speech by Jack Stillinger, the editor of a standard critical edition of Keats' poetry and a well-respected Keats scholar, was entitled "Multiple Readers, Multiple Texts, Multiple Keats."

According to Marnon, Stillinger "gave a very close reading of a long Keats poem. The Eve of St. Agnes' in which he found multiple readings, multiple readers and in fact, multiple authors."

The conference was organized by Robert Ryan of Rutgers University and Ronald Sharp of Kenyon College. It was sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Keats-Shelley Association of America, the Pforzheimer Foundation, the Acriel Foundation and Houghton Library.