"The Critical Heritage" series gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The selected sources range from important essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The whole "Critical Heritage" series is available as a set of 67 volumes, in mini-sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) or as individual volumes.

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Over the course of his short life, John Keats (1795-1821) honed a raw talent into a brilliant poetic maturity. By the end of his brief career, he had written poems of such beauty, imagination and generosity of spirit, that he had - unwittingly - fulfilled his wish that he should 'be among the English poets after my death'. 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 volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series offers students and readers a comprehensive selection of the work of John Keats (1795-1821). Accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, this authoritative edition enables students to study Keats's work afresh, bringing his poetry and letters together in chronological order. The backbone of this volume is provided by the poems published in Keats's lifetime-the three volumes, Poems (1817), Endymion (1818), and Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820), together with the small number of poems he published elsewhere. But a much larger body of Keats's writing was seen only in manuscript, if at all, by Keats's friends and family-the unpublished poems which include the dream vision, The Fall of Hyperion, his annotations of Shakespeare and Milton, and, above all, his extraordinary letters. These are placed at the date on which they were written or at their probable date. This selection of poems, prose, and letters therefore creates a double time scheme. It places the poetry by which Keats was known to a frequently antagonistic reading public in his lifetime within the extensive biographical context provided by his unpublished poems and letters. This substantial body of manuscript evidence, some of it not discovered until the twentieth-century and none of it known to Keats's reading public, is now part of our understanding of his life and work, and allows us to follow his extraordinary intellectual, emotional, and artistic self-making in the three short years between Poems (1817) and 1820. Explanatory notes and commentary are included to enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works, and the edition includes an Introduction to the life of Keats, and a Chronology.

  ‘I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections
 and the truth of Imagination’

Keats’s first volume of poems, published in 1817, demonstrated both his belief in the consummate power of poetry and his liberal views. While he was criticized by many for his politics, his immediate circle of friends and family immediately recognized his genius. In his short life he proved to be one of the greatest and most original thinkers of the second generation of Romantic poets, with such poems as ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ and ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’. While his writing is illuminated by his exaltation of the imagination and abounds with sensuous descriptions of nature’s beauty, it also explores profound philosophical questions.

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.

'I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination' - Keats, in a letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey in November 1817. In a period of great letter-writing, Keats's letters are outstanding. They begin in summer 1816, as he approached his twenty-first birthday, and were written over the next four years until his early death. Viewed together, they give the fullest and most poignant record we have of Keats's ambitions and hopes as a poet, his life as a literary man about town, his close relationship with his brothers and young sister, and, later, his passionate, jealous and frustrated love for Fanny Brawne. Keats enclosed many of his poems with his letters, and read together, they offer an incomparable insight into his creative process and development as a poet. This major new edition edited by Professor John Barnard includes an introduction and notes, as well as a map of Keats's Scottish walking tour and reproductions of his letters. John Keats was born in October 1795. His Poems appeared in 1817, while Endymion was published in 1818, both to mixed reviews. In 1819 he wrote The Eve of St Agnes, La Belle Dame sans Merci, the major odes, Lamia and the Fall of Hyperion. Keats was already unwell when preparing his 1820 volume for the press; by the time it appeared in July he was desperately ill. He died in Rome in 1821, in a rented apartment next to the Spanish Steps, at the age of twenty-five. John Barnard is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Leeds and has edited The Complete Poems of Keats for Penguin Classics.