The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The Collected Critical Heritage set will be available as a set of 68 volumes and the series will also be available in mini sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) and as individual volumes.y

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.

In The Cambridge Companion to Keats, leading scholars discuss Keats's work in several fascinating contexts: literary history and key predecessors; Keats's life in London's intellectual, aesthetic and literary culture and the relation of his poetry to the visual arts. These specially commissioned essays are sophisticated but accessible, challenging but lucid, and are complemented by an introduction to Keats's life, a chronology, a list of contemporary people and periodicals, a source reference for famous phrases and ideas articulated in Keats's letters, a glossary of literary terms and a guide to further reading.

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

The poems of John Keats have traditionally been regarded as most resistant of all Romantic poetry to the concerns of history and politics. But critical trends have begun to overturn this assumption. Keats and History brings together exciting work by British and American scholars, in thirteen essays which respond to interest in the historical dimensions of Keats's poems and letters, and open alternative perspectives on his achievement. Keats's writings are approached through politics, social history, feminism, economics, historiography, stylistics, aesthetics, and mathematical theory. The editor's introduction places the volume in relation to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century readings of the poet. Keats and History will be welcomed by students of English literature, and by all those interested in English Romanticism.