Selected Letters of John Keats

Selected Letters of John Keats
Author: John Keats
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 588
Release: 2009-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780674039391

The letters of John Keats are, T. S. Eliot remarked, "what letters ought to be; the fine things come in unexpectedly, neither introduced nor shown out, but between trifle and trifle." This new edition, which features four rediscovered letters, three of which are being published here for the first time, affords readers the pleasure of the poet's "trifles" as well as the surprise of his most famous ideas emerging unpredictably. Unlike other editions, this selection includes letters to Keats and among his friends, lending greater perspective to an epistolary portrait of the poet. It also offers a revealing look at his "posthumous existence," the period of Keats's illness in Italy, painstakingly recorded in a series of moving letters by Keats's deathbed companion, Joseph Severn. Other letters by Dr. James Clark, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Richard Woodhouse--omitted from other selections of Keats's letters--offer valuable additional testimony concerning Keats the man. Edited for greater readability, with annotations reduced and punctuation and spelling judiciously modernized, this selection recreates the spontaneity with which these letters were originally written.

The Complete Poems

The Complete Poems
Author: John Keats
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 979
Release: 2003-08-28
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0141961007

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.

Romantic Dialogues and Afterlives

Romantic Dialogues and Afterlives
Author: Monika Coghen
Publisher: Wydawnictwo UJ
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2020-06-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 8323371644

Romantic writers often asserted their individuality, but this assertion tended to take the form of positioning themselves in relation to other authors and literary texts. Thus they implicitly acknowledged the rich network of broadly understood poetic dialogue as an important and potent source for their own creativity. When in 1816 John Keats wrote “Great spirits now on earth are sojourning,” he celebrated the originality of his contemporaries and the historical significance of his times, pointing to deep interest in “the hum of mighty works” in all the fields of human activity, to which “the nations” ought to listen. Keats’s sonnet suggests not only stimulating exchanges between poets, artists and social thinkers in the same language, but also the idea of transnational appreciation and dialogue. The volume takes up this idea and explores the dialogues of Romantic authors within the wide scope of European and American cultures. Essays by scholars from Germany, Britain, Bulgaria, Poland, Canada and the United States of America examine Romantic writers’ responses to their contemporaries, explore their dialogues with the culture of the past, and their interactions across the arts and sciences. They also scrutinize the Romantics’ far-reaching influence on later writers and artists, and thus extend the network of artistic exchange to modern times. The volume offers a rich tapestry of interconnections that span across time and space, interlace languages and cultures, and link Romantic writers and artists with their predecessors and successors across Europe and America. The essays in the collection invite the reader to join ongoing dialogues between writers and their audiences, of the past and present.

The Letters of John Keats: Volume 1, 1814-1818

The Letters of John Keats: Volume 1, 1814-1818
Author: Hyder Edward Rollins
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2012-02-16
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1107608201

This 1958 book forms the first part of a two-volume edition of Keats's letters, covering 1814 to 1818.

Keats

Keats
Author: Andrew Motion
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 702
Release: 1999-04-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780226542409

Andrew Motion's dramatic narration of Keats's life is the first in a generation to take a fresh look at this great English Romantic poet. Unlike previous biographers, Motion pays close attention to the social and political worlds Keats inhabited. Making incisive use of the poet's inimitable letters, Motion presents a masterful account. "Motion has given us a new Keats, one who is skinned alive, a genius who wrote in a single month all the poems we cherish, a victim who was tormented by the best doctors of the age. . . . This portrait, stripped of its layers of varnish and restored to glowing colours, should last us for another generation."—Edmund White, The Observer Review "Keats's letters fairly leap off the page. . . . [Motion] listens for the 'freely associating inquiry and incomparable verve and dash,' the 'headlong charge,' of Keats's jazzlike improvisations, which give us, like no other writing in English, the actual rush of a man thinking, a mind hurtling forward unpredictably and sweeping us along."—Morris Dickstein, New York Times Book Review "Scrupulous and eloquent."—Gregory Feeley, Philadelphia Inquirer

Joseph Severn, A Life

Joseph Severn, A Life
Author: Sue Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2009-10-08
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0199565023

A new biography of Joseph Severn, Keats's best-known but most controversial friend, who is buried next to him in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. Severn accompanied the dying poet to Italy and was virtually the only witness of his last days. Brown reassesses Severn's character and the nature of his friendship with Keats.

Keats and Romantic Celticism

Keats and Romantic Celticism
Author: C. Gallant
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2005-06-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230502490

The Celtic Revival began more than a century before Yeats and the Irish Literary Renaissance. Keats and Romantic Celtism is the first book to consider the pervasive influence of period Celticism upon Keats's work, from the Druidism that underlies his unfinished epics to the Celtic-derived folklore that his poetry draws upon. Christine Gallant shows that more than two hundred and fifty traditional folklore motifs of the faerie fill his major poems, as well as minor epistolary ones that have been critically neglected.

Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet's Body

Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet's Body
Author: James Robert Allard
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2016-04-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317061357

That medicine becomes professionalized at the very moment that literature becomes "Romantic" is an important coincidence, and James Allard makes the most of it. His book restores the physical body to its proper place in Romantic studies by exploring the status of the human body during the period. With meticulous detail, he documents the way medical discourse consolidates a body susceptible to medical authority that is then represented in the works of Romantic era poets. In doing so, he attends not only to the history of medicine's professionalization but significantly to the rhetoric of legitimation that advances the authority of doctors over the bodies of patients and readers alike. After surveying trends in Romantic-era medicine and analyzing the body's treatment in key texts by Wordsworth and Joanna Baillie, Allard moves quickly to his central subject-the Poet-Physician. This hybrid figure, discovered in the works of the medically trained John Keats, John Thelwall, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, embodies the struggles occasioned by the discrepancies and affinities between medicine and poetry.