Poems by John Keats

Poems by John Keats

Here at last is the definitive Keats--an edition of John Keats's poems that embodies the readings the poet himself most probably intended. The culmination of a tradition of literary and textual scholarship, it is the work of the one scholar best qualified to do the job.
Largely because of the wealth and complexity of the manuscript materials and the frequency with which first printings were based on inferior sources, there has never been a thoroughly reliable edition of Keats. Indeed, in The Texts of Keats's Poems Jack Stillinger demonstrated that fully one-third of the poems as printed in current standard editions contain substantive errors. This edition is the first in the history of Keats scholarship to be based on a systematic investigation of the transmission of the texts. The readings given here represent in each case, as exactly as can be determined, the version that Keats preferred. The chronological arrangement of the poems and the full record of variants and manuscript alterations (presented in a style that will be clear to the general reader as well as useful to the scholar) display the development of Keats's poetic artistry. Notes at the back provide dates of composition, relate extant manuscripts and early printings, and explain the choices of texts.

The London Times said of Stillinger's earlier study of the texts: Thanks to Mr. Stillinger a revolution in Keats studies is at hand. Here is the crucial step in that revolution.

John Keats was born in Moorfields in October 1795, the son of a livery stable manager. His father died of TB in 1804 and his mother in 1810. He had gotten a good education at John Clarke's Enfield private school by that time. He began his professional training as an apprentice to a surgeon in 1811 and completed it at Guy's Hospital in 1816. His decision to devote himself to poetry rather than a medical profession was bold, based more on a personal challenge than any genuine achievement. Early Mends like Charles Cowden Clarke and J.

H.Reynolds, and he met Leigh Hunt, whose Examiner had already published Keats' first poem, in October 1816. Poems (1817) was published only seven months later. Despite the Hunt circle's great hopes, it was a flop. By the time Endymion was published in 1818, Keats' name had become synonymous with Hunt's Cockney School, and the Conservative Blackwood's Magazine attacked him as a lower-class vulgarian who had no right to aspire to 'poetry.'

Yet, Keats' fame was based on posterity rather than contemporary literary politics. His inspiration and challenge came from Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth. From his letters, it is clear that Keats matured at an incredible rate. He wrote The Eve of St Agnes, La Belle Dame sans Merci, The Major Odes, Lamia, and the deeply exploratory Fall of Hyperion in 1819, after working on the magnificent epic fragment Hyperion in 1818.

Whilst preparing the 1820 book for the press, Keats was already ailing, and by the time it was published in July, he was very ill. In 1821, he died in Rome. Although Keats' final volume received considerable critical acclaim at the time, it wasn't until the later half of the nineteenth century that his place in English Romanticism became clear, and it wasn't until this century that it was fully realized.