A detailed study of John Keats's classic volume of poetry published in 1820 considered in the light of the history of melancholyFirst, book-length critical study of John Keats's collection of poems, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, And Other Poems (1820)Considers the anthology as a poetically and thematically unified collection, instead of the more usual method of analyzing the poems in chronological order of writingProposes that the main theme running through the volume is melancholy, a very capacious medical category extending back to ancient Greco-Roman writers, through the Renaissance, and the subject of literary cults in the Romantic ageThe first detailed study of Keats's markings and annotations on his copy of Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) which was his favourite book during 1819 when he was writing the poemsThis book examines John Keats's immensely important collection of poems, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, And Other Poems (1820), and is published in the volume's bicentenary. It analyses the collection as an authorially organised and multi-dimensionally unified volume rather than as a collection of occasional poems. R. S. White argues that a guiding theme behind the 1820 volume is the persistent emphasis on different types of melancholy, an ancient, all-consuming medical condition and literary preoccupation in Renaissance and Romantic poetry. Melancholy was a lifelong interest of Keats's, touching on his medical training, his temperament and his delighted reading in 1819 of Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy.

This study explores the poet John Keats' manuscript medical Notebook from his time at Guy's Hospital (October 1815 - March 1816), reconstructing and recovering the intriguing and mutually enriching connections between Keats' two careers of medicine and poetry.

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.