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Complete Poems (Paperback)
John Keats; Edited by Jack Stillinger
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Here is the first reliable edition of Keats's complete poems
designed expressly for general readers and students.
Upon its publication in 1978, Stillinger's "The Poems of John
Keats" won exceptionally high praise: "The definitive Keats,"
proclaimed "The New Republic"--"An authoritative edition embodying
the readings the poet himself most probably intended, prepared by
the leading scholar in Keats textual studies."
Now this scholarship is at last available in a graceful, clear
format designed to introduce students and general readers to the
"real" Keats. In place of the textual apparatus that was essential
to scholars, Stillinger here provides helpful explanatory notes.
These notes give dates of composition, identify quotations and
allusions, gloss names and words not included in the ordinary desk
dictionary, and refer the reader to the best critical
interpretations of the poems. The new introduction provides central
facts about Keats's life and career, describes the themes of his
best work, and speculates on the causes of his greatness.
Jack Stillinger's concern is with the words of Keats's texts: "I
wish," he says, "to get rid of the wrong ones and to suggest how to
go about constructing texts with a greater proportion of the right
ones." He finds that in the two best modern editions of Keats, one
third of the texts have one or more wrong words. Modern editors
have sometimes based their texts on inferior holograph, transcript,
or printed versions; sometimes combined readings from separate
versions; sometimes retained words added by copyists and early
editors (who frequently made "improvements" when they thought the
poems needed them); and sometimes, of course, introduced
independent errors of their own. The heart of this book is a
systematic account of the textual history of each of the 150 poems
that can reasonably be assigned to Keats. In each history
Stillinger dates the work, as closely as it can be dated; gives the
details of first publication; specifies the existing variant
readings and their sources; and suggests what might be the basis
for a standard text.
Here at last is the definitive Keats-an edition of John Keats's
poems that embodies the readings the poet himself most probably
intended. The culmination of a tradition of literary and textual
scholarship, it is the work of the one scholar best qualified to do
the job. Largely because of the wealth and complexity of the
manuscript materials and the frequency with which first printings
were based on inferior sources, there has never been a thoroughly
reliable edition of Keats. Indeed, in The Texts of Keats's Poems
Jack Stillinger demonstrated that fully one third of the poems as
printed in current standard editions contain substantive errors.
This edition is the first in the history of Keats scholarship to be
based on a systematic investigation of the transmission of the
texts. The readings given here represent in each case, as exactly
as can be determined, the version that Keats preferred. The
chronological arrangement of the poems and the full record of
variants and manuscript alterations (presented in a style that will
be clear to the general reader as well as useful to the scholar)
display the development of Keats's poetic artistry. Notes at the
back provide dates of composition, relate extant manuscripts and
early printings, and explain the choices of texts. The London Times
said of Stillinger's earlier study of the texts: "Thanks to Mr.
Stillinger a revolution in Keats studies is at hand." Here is the
crucial step in that revolution.
After more than a century of study, we know more about Keats than
we do about most writers of the past, but we still cannot frilly
grasp the magical processes by which he created some of the most
celebrated poems in all of English literature. This volume,
containing 140 photographs of Keats's own manuscripts, offers the
most concrete evidence we have of the way in which his thoughts and
feelings were transmuted into art. The rough first drafts in
particular are frill of information about what occurred, if not in
Keats's mind, at least on paper when he had pen in hand: the
headlong rush of ideas coming so fast that he had no time to
punctuate or even form the letters of his words; the stumbling
places where he had to begin again several times before the words
resumed their flow; the efforts to integrate story, character, and
theme with the formal requirements of rhyme and meter. Each
revision teaches the inquiring reader something about Keats's
poetic practice. Several of the manuscripts are unique
authoritative sources, while others constitute our best texts among
multiple existing versions. They reveal much about the maturation
of the poet's creativity during four years of his brief life,
between "On Receiving a Curious Shell" (1815) and "To Autumn"
(1819). Above all, they show us what is lost when penmanship yields
to the printed page: what Helen Vendler, in her insightfiul essay
on the manuscripts, calls "the living hand of Keats." These sharply
reproduced facsimiles provide compelling visual evidence of a
mortal author in the act of composing immortal works.
Using the 180-year history of Keats's Eve of St. Agnes as a basis
for theorizing about the reading process, Stillinger's book
explores the nature and whereabouts of `meaning' in complex works.
A proponent of authorial intent, Stillinger argues a theoretical
compromise between author and reader, applying a theory of
interpretive democracy tha includes the endlessly multifarious
reader's response as well as Keats's guessed-at intent. Stillinger
also ruminates on the process of constructing meaning, and posits
an answer to why Keats's work is considered canonical, and why it
is still being read and admired.
Textual pluralism holds that there can exist more than one
authoritative version of a literary work, and that only by viewing
the collective versions can the constitution of a work be seen. In
Coleridge and Textual Instability, Jack Stillinger establishes and
documents the existence of numerous different authoritative
versions of Coleridge's best-known poems: sixteen or more of The
Eolian Harp, for example, eighteen of The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, and comparable numbers for This Lime-Tree Bower, Frost at
Midnight, Kubla Khan, Christabel, and Dejection: An Ode. Such
multiplicity of versions raises interesting theoretical and
practical questions about the make-up of the Coleridge canon, the
ontological identity of any specific work in the canon, the
editorial treatment of Coleridge's works, and the ways in which
multiple versions complicate interpretation of the poems as a
unified (or, as the case may be, disunified) body of work.
Providing much new information about the texts and production of
Coleridge's major poems, Stillinger's study offers intriguing new
theories about the nature of authorship and the composition of
literary works.
This is a study of the collaborative creation behind literary works
that are usually considered to be written by a single author.
Although most theories of interpretation and editing depend on a
concept of single authorship, many works are actually developed by
more than one author. Stillinger examines case histories from
Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mill, and T.S. Eliot, as well as from
American fiction, plays, and films, demonstrating that multiple
authorship is a widespread phenomenon. He shows that the reality of
how an author produces a work is often more complex than is
expressed in the romantic notion of the author as solitary genius.
The cumulative evidence revealed in this engaging study indicates
that collaboration deserves to be included in any account of
authorial achievement.
One of the deans of literary criticism in America, M. H. Abrams is
Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell University. He is the
author of two landmark books, The Mirror and the Lamp and Natural
Supernaturalism, and general editor of the Norton Anthology of
English Literature. This volume collects the essays, written over
three decades, which-together with his books-testify to his
preeminence. The essays examine Wordsworth's and Coleridge's
innovations in their theories about the language of poetry; the
prevalence, sources, and significance of a key Romantic image, the
"correspondent breeze"; the pervasive revolutionary spirit of
Romanticism; the defining characteristics and chief exemplars of
the most distinctive poetic genre of the age, the "greater Romantic
lyric"; the relation of Coleridge and Wordsworth to modernist
poetics and literature; the philosophic and scientific backgrounds
of Coleridge's thinking; and the numerous manifestations of
apocalypticism in the Romantic period.
The real test of Abram s historical explanations is of course
whether or not they work whether, when we apply the criteria of
correspondence and coherence (Just as in interpreting a poem), they
make sense out of the particulars at hand and produce useful
generalizations even in the face of competing historical
interpretations. Abrams work continues to hold up. Jack Stillinger"
In "Romantic Complexity, " Jack Stillinger examines three of the
most admired poets of English Romanticism--Keats, Coleridge, and
Wordsworth--with a focus on the complexity that results from the
multiple authorship, the multiple textual representation, and the
multiple reading and interpretation of their best works.
Specific topics include the joint authorship of Wordsworth and
Coleridge in the "Lyrical Ballads, " an experiment of 1798 that
established the most essential characteristics of modern poetry;
Coleridge's creation of eighteen or more different versions of "The
Ancient Mariner" and how this textual multiplicity affects
interpretation; the historical collaboration between Keats and his
readers to produce fifty-nine separate but entirely legitimate
readings of "The Eve of St. Agnes;" and a number of practical and
theoretical matters bearing on the relationships among these
writers and their influences on one another.
Stillinger shows his deep understanding of the poets' lives,
works, and the history of their reception, in chapters rich with
intriguing questions and answers sure to engage students and
teachers of the world's greatest poetry.
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