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This new edition in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series presents a substantial selection of Keats's writings arranged chronologically as his contemporary readers first encountered them. Its backbone 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 But a much larger body of Keats's writing was seen only in manuscript, if at all, by Keats's friends and family-the unpublished poems which include the dream vision, The Fall of Hyperion, his annotations of Shakespeare and Milton, and, above all, his extraordinary letters.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to a frequently antagonistic reading public in his lifetime within the extensive biographical context provided by his unpublished poems and letters.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.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Chronology
- A Note on the Selection and its Ordering
- LETTERS AND POEMS 1814 TO 9 MARCH 1817
- On Peace
- Lines Written on 29 May, the Anniversary of Charles's Restoration, on Hearing the Bells Ringing
- 'Fill for me a brimming Bowl'
- 'As from the darkening gloom a silver dove'
- 'Oh Chatterton! how very sad thy fate'
- Ode to Apollo
- To Solitude (Examiner version, 5 May 1816)
- 'I am as brisk'
- 'Give me women wine and snuff'
- 'Oh! how I love on a fair summer's eve'
- Keats to Charles Cowden Clarke, 9 October 1816
- On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (Examiner version, 1 December 1816)
- Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition
- 'After dark vapors have oppressed our plains' (Examiner, 23 February 1817)
- 'God of the golden bow'
- To Haydon, with a Sonnet Written on Seeing the Elgin Marbles (Examiner and Champion, 9 March 1817)
- On Seeing the Elgin Marbles (Examiner and Champion, 9 March 1817)
- POEMS (1817)
- Dedication: To Leigh Hunt, Esq.
- Poems:
- ['I stood tip-toe upon a little hill']
- Specimen of an Induction to a Poem
- Calidore: A Fragmnent
- To Some Ladies
- On Receiving a Curious Shell, and a Copy of Verses, from the Same Ladies
- To ****
- To Hope
- Imitation of Spenser
- ['Woman! when I behold thee flippant, vain']
- Epistles:
- To George Felton Mathew
- To My Brother George
- To Charles Cowden Clarke
- Sonnets:
- I To my Brother George
- II To ******
- III Written on the Day Mr. Leigh Hunt left Prison
- IV ['How many bards gild the lapses of time!']
- V To a Friend who sent me some Roses
- VI To G. A. W.
- VII ['O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell']
- VIII To My Brothers
- IX ['Keen, fitful gusts are whisp'ring here ad there']
- X ['To one who has been long in city pent']
- XI On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
- XII On Leaving some Friends at an early Hour
- XIII Addressed to Haydon
- XIV Addressed to the Same
- XV To the Grasshopper and the Cricket
- XVI To Kosciusko
- XVII ['Happy is England! I could be content']
- Sleep and Poetry
- LETTERS, PROSE, AND POEMS: EARLY MARCH 1817 TO APRIL 1818
- On a Leander which Miss Reynolds my Kind friend gave me
About the author
John Barnard was Professor of English Literature at the University of Leeds, 1978-2001, and is a Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, University of London. He has written extensively on seventeenth century literature, Dryden, the second generation Romantics, and book history, and has published editions of John Keats (Penguin Classics, 1973, etc.), William Congreve (1972), and Sir George Etherege (1979), and edited the Critical Heritage Pope (1973). His study of Keats was published by Cambridge University Press in 1987. From 1975 to 2010 he was General Editor of Longman Annotated Poets. He edited The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume IV, 1557-1695 (2002) with D. F. McKenzie, and published John Keats: Selected Letters in 2014.
Summary
This new volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series presents a substantial selection of Keats's writings arranged chronologically as his contemporary readers first encountered them. It places the poetry by which Keats was known to a reading public in his lifetime within the biographical context provided by his unpublished poems and letters.
Additional text
The volume is an editorial tour-de-force that breathes revivifying energy into our grasp of Keats's writings as it 'creates' what the editor calls 'a double time scheme', placing 'the poetry by which Keats was known to the reading public in his lifetime within the extensive biographical context provided by his unpublished poems and letters' (xxxv-xxxvi). It is an editorial achievement of the first importance.
Report
The volume is an editorial tour-de-force that breathes revivifying energy into our grasp of Keats's writings as it 'creates' what the editor calls 'a double time scheme', placing 'the poetry by which Keats was known to the reading public in his lifetime within the extensive biographical context provided by his unpublished poems and letters' (xxxv-xxxvi). It is an editorial achievement of the first importance. Michael O'Neill, The BARS Review
