(This edition offers extensive apparatus to help readers f...)
This edition offers extensive apparatus to help readers fully appreciate Keats’s poetry and legacy, including an introduction, headnotes, explanatory annotations, and a wealth of contextual documents. “Criticism” includes twelve important commentaries on Keats and his poetry, by Paul de Man, Marjorie Levinson, Grant F. Scott, Margaret Homans, Nicholas Roe, Stuart Sperry, Neil Fraistat, Jack Stillinger, James Chandler, Alan Bewell, and Jeffrey N. Cox.
(This Modern Library edition contains all of Keats's magni...)
This Modern Library edition contains all of Keats's magnificent verse: 'Lamia,' 'Isabella,' and 'The Eve of St. Agnes'; his sonnets and odes; the allegorical romance Endymion; and the five-act poetic tragedy Otho the Great.
(John Barnard's acclaimed volume contains all the poems kn...)
John Barnard's acclaimed volume contains all the poems known to have been written by Keats, arranged by date of composition. The texts are lightly modernized and are complemented by extensive notes, a comprehensive introduction, an index of classical names, selected extracts from Keats's letters and a number of pieces not widely available, including his annotations to Milton's Paradise Lost.
(This wide-ranging selection of Keats’s poetry contains yo...)
This wide-ranging selection of Keats’s poetry contains youthful verse, such as his earliest known poem 'Imitation of Spenser'; poems from his celebrated collection of 1820 - including 'Lamia', 'Isabella', 'The Eve of St Agnes', 'Ode to a Nightingale' and 'Hyperion' - and later celebrated works such as 'La Belle Dame sans Merci'. Also included are many poems considered by Keats to be lesser work, but which illustrate his more earthy, playful side and superb ear for everyday language.
(This authoritative edition was originally published in th...)
This authoritative edition was originally published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique combination of Keats's poetry and prose - all the major poems, complemented by a generous selection of Keats's letters - to give the essence of his work and thinking.
John Keats was an English poet. He was regarded as one of the main figures of the generation of Romantic poets, whose works were recognized only after his death.
Background
John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London, in the family of the owner of a paid stables (horse-riding station). He was the first child of Thomas Keats and Francis Keats, nee Jennings. Then followed the brothers George, Thomas, Edward and sister Francis Mary (Fanny).
Keats's father was killed in an accident on April 16, 1804. Just two months later, on June 27, 1804, his mother remarried, to William Rolings. This marriage was unsuccessful, and the children settled with their mother's parents in Anfield (north of London).
In March 1810, Keats's mother died of tuberculosis, and in July the guardians of orphaned children were John Nauland Sandell and Richard Abby. In 1816, after the death of Sandell, the only guardian was Richard Abby, a tea-seller by profession.
Education
In August 1803, John entered the private closed school of the Reverend John Clark (also in Anfield). At the age of 15, Keats, was sent to London to study medicine; he could not afford to get a university education and did not even have the opportunity to study classical languages. Deep penetration of the spirit of Hellenism came in his poetry intuitively, since he could read the Greek poets only in translation. Soon, Keats abandoned his medicine classes in London hospitals and focused on literature.
Career
In 1816 Keats became a licensed apothecary, but he never practiced his profession, deciding instead to write poetry. Around this time, he met Leigh Hunt, an influential editor of the Examiner, who published his sonnets "On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer" and "O Solitude." Hunt also introduced Keats to a circle of literary men, including the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth. The group’s influence enabled Keats to see his first volume, Poems by John Keats, published in 1817. Shelley, who was fond of Keats, had advised him to develop a more substantial body of work before publishing it. Keats, who was not as fond of Shelley, did not follow his advice. Endymion, a four-thousand-line erotic/allegorical romance based on the Greek myth of the same name, appeared the following year.
Keats spent the summer of 1818 on a walking tour in Northern England and Scotland, returning home to care for his brother, Tom, who suffered from tuberculosis. While nursing his brother, Keats met and fell in love with a woman named Fanny Brawne. Writing some of his finest poetry between 1818 and 1819, he mainly worked on "Hyperion," a Miltonic blank-verse epic of the Greek creation myth. He stopped writing "Hyperion" upon the death of his brother, after completing only a small portion, but in late 1819 he returned to the piece and rewrote it as "The Fall of Hyperion" (unpublished until 1856). That same autumn Keats contracted tuberculosis, and by the following February he felt that death was already upon him, referring to the present as his "posthumous existence."
In July 1820, he published his third and best volume of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems. The three title poems, dealing with mythical and legendary themes of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance times, are rich in imagery and phrasing. The volume also contains the unfinished "Hyperion," and three poems considered among the finest in the English language, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode on Melancholy," and "Ode to a Nightingale." The book received enthusiastic praise from Hunt, Shelley, Charles Lamb, and others, and in August, Frances Jeffrey, influential editor of the Edinburgh Review, wrote a review praising both the new book and Endymion.
The fragment "Hyperion" was considered by Keats’s contemporaries to be his greatest achievement, but by that time he had reached an advanced stage of his disease and was too ill to be encouraged. He continued a correspondence with Fanny Brawne and - when he could no longer bear to write to her directly - her mother, but his failing health and his literary ambitions prevented their getting married. Under his doctor’s orders to seek a warm climate for the winter, Keats went to Rome with his friend, the painter Joseph Severn. He died there on February 23, 1821, at the age of twenty-five, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery.
Like other romantic writers, Keats had a central need somehow to adjust the evidence that, as he put it, "The world is full of troubles" with an exalted intuition of cosmic harmony; this preoccupation runs as a major trend through his letters. Another basic problem with which Keats's letters deal is how to reconcile the rival claims of romantic subjectivity, which makes for sincerity, concreteness, intensity, and originality, and of aesthetic objectivity, which alone raises poetry to universal meaningfulness.
Quotations:
"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard, are sweeter."
"Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?"
"I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain."
"Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know."
"I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination."
"I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top."
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
Despite his small stature - his height was scarcely to exceed five feet (1. 5 meters) - Keats was notable for a passionate, even pugnacious, disposition.
Connections
A lot of mental suffering caused Keats his love for Fanny Brawne, with whom they were engaged, but could not get married because of his difficult financial situation.
Father:
Thomas Keats
Mother:
Frances Jennings
Brother:
George Keats
Brother:
Thomas Keats
Sister:
Frances Mary Keats
Partner:
Fanny Brawne
References
John Keats: A New Life
This landmark biography of celebrated Romantic poet John Keats explodes entrenched conceptions of him as a delicate, overly sensitive, tragic figure. Instead, Nicholas Roe reveals the real flesh-and-blood poet: a passionate man driven by ambition but prey to doubt, suspicion, and jealousy; sure of his vocation while bitterly resentful of the obstacles that blighted his career; devoured by sexual desire and frustration; and in thrall to alcohol and opium.
John Keats
In this authoritative biography by Walter Jackson Bate the man and the poet are portrayed with rare insight and sympathy. In spite of a scarcity of factual data for his early years, the materials for Keats's life are nevertheless unusually full.