John Keats

This volume contains all the poems and plays known to have been written by Keats, as well as two poems and a fragment of a play which are of doubtful attributes. There are extensive notes, including long extracts from letters, and a dictionary of classical names based largely on the work of Lempriere, with which Keats himself was familiar. For this third edition, the editor has made various textual amendments and added a sixth Appendix which contains a selection of Keat's letters.

Today John Keats endures as the archetypal Romantic genius who explored the limits of the imagination and celebrated the pleasures of the senses but suffered a tragic early death. Edmund Wilson counted him as "one of the half dozen greatest English writers," and T.S. Eliot has paid tribute to the Shakespearean quality of Keat's greatness. Indeed, his work has survived better than that of any of his contemporaries the devaluation of the Romantic poetry that began early in this century. This Modern Library Edition contains all of Keat'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. Presented as well are the famous posthumous and fugitive poems, including the fragmentary "The Eve of Saint Mark" and the great "La Belle Dame sans Merci," perhaps the most distinguished literary ballad in the language.

Collection of lyric and narrative poems written by John Keats. These odes,sonnets, narratives and narrative fragments are the works we have come to most thoroughly identify with Romanticism in English literature.

The only things more miraculous than Keats's career--he began writing at the age of eighteen, and by the time he died, seven years later, in 1821, he had produced a substantial number of the greatest poems in English--are those poems themselves. Nowhere has the pressure of human imagination been brought more powerfully to bear on our mortal condition than in his great narratives and narrative fragments, his sonnets of discovery, and his six magnificent odes, culminating in "To Autumn". The new Everyman edition of the poems presents a re-ordered and re-edited version of the complete text with detailed notes to every poem.