Excerpt from The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats Although I have endeavored to draw from Keats's letters such passages as throw direct light on his poetry, there yet remains an undefined scholia in the whole body of his familiar correspondence. N o attentive reader of Keats's letters will fail to find in these unstudied, spontaneous expressions of the poet's mind a lambent light playing all over the surface of his poetry, and therefore it is not a wide departure from the scheme of this series of poets to include, in the same volume with Keats's poems, a collection also of his letters. This collection is complete, though one or two brief notes will not be found here, because already printed in the headings to poems. I have been dependent for the text mainly upon Mr. Colvin, supplemented by the minute garnering of Mr. Forman. I have to thank Mr. John Gilmer Speed for his courtesy in permitting the use of letters which be derived from the papers of his grandfather, George Keats. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This is a new release of the original 1932 edition.

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.