Selected Letters Of John Keats

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.

This book contains a collection of Keats' letters, written over four years. With extraordinary candour and self-knowledge he gives us his experience of almost everything that can happen to a young man between the ages of 21 and 25.

'I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination' - Keats, in a letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey in November 1817. In a period of great letter-writing, Keats's letters are outstanding. They begin in summer 1816, as he approached his twenty-first birthday, and were written over the next four years until his early death. Viewed together, they give the fullest and most poignant record we have of Keats's ambitions and hopes as a poet, his life as a literary man about town, his close relationship with his brothers and young sister, and, later, his passionate, jealous and frustrated love for Fanny Brawne. Keats enclosed many of his poems with his letters, and read together, they offer an incomparable insight into his creative process and development as a poet. This major new edition edited by Professor John Barnard includes an introduction and notes, as well as a map of Keats's Scottish walking tour and reproductions of his letters. John Keats was born in October 1795. His Poems appeared in 1817, while Endymion was published in 1818, both to mixed reviews. In 1819 he wrote The Eve of St Agnes, La Belle Dame sans Merci, the major odes, Lamia and the Fall of Hyperion. Keats was already unwell when preparing his 1820 volume for the press; by the time it appeared in July he was desperately ill. He died in Rome in 1821, in a rented apartment next to the Spanish Steps, at the age of twenty-five. John Barnard is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Leeds and has edited The Complete Poems of Keats for Penguin Classics.

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