John Keats

This volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series offers students and readers a comprehensive selection of the work of John Keats (1795-1821). Accompanied by full scholarly apparatus this authoritative edition enables students to study Keats's work afresh bringing his poetry and letters together in chronological order. <p/>The backbone of this volume is provided by the poems published in Keats's lifetime--the three volumes <em>Poems</em> (1817) <em>Endymion</em> (1818) and <em>Lamia Isabella The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems</em> (1820) together with the small number of poems he published elsewhere. But a much larger body of Keats's writing was seen only in manuscript if at all by Keats's friends and family--the unpublished poems which include the dream vision <em>The Fall of Hyperion</em> his annotations of Shakespeare and Milton and above all his extraordinary letters. These are placed at the date on which they were written or at their probable date. <p/>This selection of poems prose and letters therefore creates a double time scheme. It places the poetry by which Keats was known to a frequently antagonistic reading public in his lifetime within the extensive biographical context provided by his unpublished poems and letters. This substantial body of manuscript evidence some of it not discovered until the twentieth-century and none of it known to Keats's reading public is now part of our understanding of his life and work and allows us to follow his extraordinary intellectual emotional and artistic self-making in the three short years between <em>Poems</em> (1817) and 1820. <p/>Explanatory notes and commentary are included to enhance the study understanding and enjoyment of these works and the edition includes an Introduction to the life of Keats and a Chronology.<br>