Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32291 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 752 pages

About the Author
John Keats (1795-1821) is one of the greatest of the Romantic poets. Beyond his influence on poetry and literature, his body of work continues to be immensely popular. John Barnard is an authority on the Romantic period.

Customer Reviews

Complete Poems, edited by Jack Stillinger
Stillinger's edition is generally considered the best text of Keats' poems -- the other scholarly edition being the one edited by John Bernard. How much do you need a scholarly text? Well, for the major poems (ie. the later ones -- the odes, 'To Autumn', perhaps the narrative poems, the Fall of Hyperion) all editions print pretty much the same text. If you're into Keats (and I'm horrified at the thought of someone even reading him who isn't!) then you'll want to read all of his poems -- which isn't hard, becuase he didn't live long enough to write many.

With these other poems, having a reliable edition becomes more rewarding. Many of these poems weren't printed in his lifetime, and so you rely on your editor to make a good choice about which is the most authentic manuscript version to print. Also some earlier editors decided to change Keats' wording. (See the version of 'In a drear-nighted December' in Palgrave's Golden Treasury, which includes the line "To know the change and feel it" -- the brainchild of an editor -- in place of Keats's very Keatsian "The feel of not to feel it".)

So five stars to Stillinger. (His book's also printed on that proper paper American books use.) Of course he doesn't have much interesting to say about the poems -- but what does that matter? His notes are kept at the back, where they should be, and explain allusions and dates as well as any edition.

I surely don't need to puff the poems themselves, as everyone who owns an anthology has read some. Sensuous, good-natured, passionate, sensitive -- anyone can think up adjectives that only dimly reflect the experience of reading these poems. (Keats's letters too are amazing, if you didn't know!)

In praise of the editor!
Confusingly, one of the above reviews castigates the editor of the Penguin Classics edition of Keats's Complete Poems. However that may be, the editor of the Harvard/Bellknapp edition is Jack Stillinger and I would like to praise the excellent work he has done here. He provides a concise critical introduction that answers the questions any reader is bound to pose about any major poet: what are his main themes/concerns? why is he considered 'great'? and what is distinctive about his writing? It is a tribute to Stillinger's work that, having read the introduction, I could hardly wait to re-read the familiar poems and become acquainted with those usually omitted from 'selections' and anthologies. His endnotes are also concise and illuminating. The paperback is strong and beautifully printed on quality paper. This is the edition of the poems to have.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"
A Spaniard, like I am, may not be the most accurate person to speak about English poetry. But considering my "amour fou" for W.B. Yeats, Lord Byron, Robert Browning and William Shakespeare, I think I can say one true statement: everyone should fall in love with Keats. He was probably the most uncultivated author of the whole History... but who minds about it, when his moody and sensitive soul has given us some of the lines which Oblivion could never waste.