John Keats

Here is the first reliable edition of John Keats's complete poems designed expressly for general readers and students. Upon its publication in 1978, Jack 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.

I have two luxuries to brood over...your Loveliness and the hour of my death Though John Keats (1795-1821) died when he was just twenty-five years old, he left behind some of the most exquisite and moving poetry ever written. He also left an incredibly beautiful and tender collection of love letters, inspired by his great love for Fanny Brawne. Although they knew each other for just a few short years and spent a great deal of that time due to Keats' worsening illness, which forced him to live abroad, Keats wrote again and again about Fanny--his very last poem is called simply "To Fanny"--and wrote love letters to her constantly. She, in turn, would wear the ring he had given her until her death. This remarkable volume contains the love poems and correspondence composed by Keats in the heat of his passion, and is a dazzling display of a talent cruelly cut short.

"Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?" 'Ode to a Nightingale' is a famous love poem by John Keats, written in 1819. Keats composed the poem in one day, after watching a nightingale in his garden build a nest in a plum tree. This poem is one of several 'Great Odes of 1819', which include 'Ode on Indolence', 'Ode on Melancholy', 'Ode to a Nightingale', and 'Ode to Psyche'. Keats found earlier forms of poetry unsatisfactory for his purpose, and the collection represented a new development of the ode form. The ode is a personal poem that describes Keats's journey into the state of Negative Capability. The tone of the poem rejects the optimistic pursuit of pleasure found within Keats's earlier poems, and explores the themes of nature, transience and mortality, the latter being particularly personal to Keats. John Keats (1795–1821) was one of the principal poets of the English Romantic movement. During his short life, his work received constant critical attacks from the periodicals of the day, but his posthumous influence on poets such as Alfred Tennyson has been immense. Elaborate word choice and sensual imagery characterize Keats's poetry, including a series of odes that were his masterpieces and which remain among the most popular poems in English literature.

John Keats' letters paint a unforgettably vivid and moving picture of the richly productive but also tragic final years of the poet's life. As he ponders on the nature of the writer's craft, he must first confront his brother's death from tuberculosis and then the imminent prospect of his own, tormented by the fear that he will not live to consummate his relationship with Fanny Brawne. The general selection also includes many of his finest poems, versions of which often appeared for the first time within the letters themselves. Among them are: "Ode to Melancholy", Ode of a Grecian Urn", "Old Meg", "Ode to a Nightingale", "La Belle Dame sans Merci", and "To Autumn". RUNNING TIME ➱ 2hrs. and 37mins. ©1999 NAXOS Audiobooks Ltd; (P)1999 NAXOs AudioBooks Ltd.