Complete Poems and Selected Letters

I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death John Keats soberly foretold in 1818 as he started composing the blank verse epic Hyperion. He continues to be remembered as the prototypical Romantic genius who while dying tragically young probed the boundaries of the imagination and celebrated the joys of the senses. One of the six finest English writers according to Edmund Wilson and the Shakespearean aspect of Keatss brilliance according to T. S. Eliot. In fact his work has fared better than any of his contemporaries in the early twenty-first-century Romantic poetry depreciation. The entirety of Keats beautiful verse is included in this Modern Library edition: He is most known for his sonnets and odes Lamia Isabella and The Eve of St. Agnes as well as the allegorical romance Endymion and the five-act poetic tragedy Otho the Great. The well-known fugitive and posthumous poems are also included such as the famous La Belle Dame sans Merci and the great The Eve of Saint Mark which is arguably the greatest literary ballad ever written. Shakespeare is the only other poet in English literature in Matthew Arnolds opinion to have quite the captivating felicity in his presentation of beauty. He ranks with Shakespeare in the power of naturalistic interpretation in what we call natural magic.