Over the course of his short life, John Keats (1795-1821) honed a raw talent into a brilliant poetic maturity. By the end of his brief career, he had written poems of such beauty, imagination and generosity of spirit, that he had - unwittingly - fulfilled his wish that he should ‘be among the English poets after my death’. This wide-ranging selection of Keats’s poetry contains youthful verse, such as his earliest known poem ‘Imitation of Spenser’; poems from his celebrated collection of 1820 - including ‘Lamia’, ‘Isabella’, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Hyperion’ - and later celebrated works such as ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’. Also included are many poems considered by Keats to be lesser work, but which illustrate his more earthy, playful side and superb ear for everyday language.
In his introduction, John Barnard sets Keats's work in the context of the second-generation Romantics and examines the poet's development, major concerns and preoccupations. This edition also includes a chronology, further reading and notes.