This book explores John Keats's major works in the context of his reading and the world in which he shaped his career.

Offers a biography of the nineteenth century poet, offering insights into the details of his early life in London, the torments that affected him, and the imaginative sources of his works.

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.

A dazzling new look into the short but intense, tragic life and remarkable work of John Keats, one of the greatest lyric poets of the English language, seen in a whole new light, not as the mythologized Victorian guileless nature-lover, but as the subversive, bawdy complex cynic whose life and poetry were lived and created on the edge. In this brief life, acclaimed biographer Lucasta Miller takes nine of Keats's best-known poems—"Endymion"; "On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer"; "Ode to a Nightingale"; "To Autumn"; "Bright Star" among them—and excavates how they came to be and what in Keats's life led to their creation. She writes of aspects of Keats's life that have been overlooked, and explores his imagination in the context of his world and experience, paying tribute to the unique quality of his mind. Miller, through Keats’s poetry, brilliantly resurrects and brings vividly to life, the man, the poet in all his complexity and spirit, living dangerously, disdaining respectability and cultural norms, and embracing subversive politics. Keats was a lower-middle-class outsider from a tragic and fractured family, whose extraordinary energy and love of language allowed him to pummel his way into the heart of English literature; a freethinker and a liberal at a time of repression, who delighted in the sensation of the moment. We see how Keats was regarded by his contemporaries (his writing was seen as smutty) and how the young poet’s large and boisterous life—a man of the metropolis, who took drugs, was sexually reckless and afflicted with syphilis—went straight up against the Victorian moral grain; and Miller makes clear why his writing—considered marginal and avant-garde in his own day—retains its astonishing originality, sensuousness and power two centuries on.

Caldecott Medalist Chris Raschka brings John Keats’s words to whimsical life in the poet’s only work written for children. He was a naughty boy, A naughty boy was he, He would not stop at home, He could not quiet be. English poet John Keats is remembered for his great odes and sonnets — making this lighthearted, little-known poem a special treat. As written in a letter to his young sister when he was feeling homesick on a visit to Scotland, Keats runs his rhymes up and down and all around, leading the reader on a playful chase in and out of language and meaning while caricaturing both himself and what it means to be an aspiring poet. In perfect synchrony, the celebrated Chris Raschka illustrates Keats’s droll words with his signature vibrant, energetic watercolors.

From the hauntingly serene ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ to the delicacy of his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, Keats’s poetry is treasured for its eloquence and meditative power. His beautifully lyrical work is presented here in full glory, in an anthology gathering around 60 of his most popular poems. The collection includes sonnets, odes, narrative poems, ballads and songs, and above all is a celebration of the beloved Romantic poet.