{"product_id":"complete-poems-and-selected-letters-of-john-keats-isbn-9780375756696","title":"Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats","description":"'I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death,' John Keats soberly  prophesied in 1818 as he started writing the blankverse epic \u003ci\u003eHyperion.\u003c\/i\u003e Today he endures  as the archetypal Romantic genius who explored the limits of the imagination and  celebrated the pleasures of the senses but suffered a tragic early death. Edmund  Wilson counted him as 'one of the half dozen greatest English writers,' and T. S.  Eliot has paid tribute to the Shakespearean quality of Keats's greatness. Indeed,  his work has survived better than that of any of his contemporaries the devaluation  of Romantic poetry that began early in this century. This Modern Library edition  contains all of Keats's magnificent verse: 'Lamia,' 'Isabella,' and 'The Eve of St.  Agnes'; his sonnets and odes; the allegorical romance \u003ci\u003eEndymion;\u003c\/i\u003e and the five-act  poetic tragedy \u003ci\u003eOtho the Great.\u003c\/i\u003e Presented as well are the famous posthumous and fugitive  poems, including the fragmentary 'The Eve of Saint Mark' and the great 'La Belle  Dame sans Merci,' perhaps the most distinguished literary ballad in the language.  'No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating  felicity of Keats, his perception of loveliness,' said Matthew Arnold. 'In the faculty  of naturalistic interpretation, in what we call natural magic, he ranks with Shakespeare.'\"No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness.\"John Keats was born in London in living quarters connected with his maternal grandfather's livery stable, the Swan and Hoop Inn, on October 31, 1795. He was the eldest of five children (one of whom died in infancy) begot by Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats. His father was the chief hostler at the Swan and Hoop, and the family prospered. The boy was eight years old when Thomas Keats was killed in a riding accident; the next year, in 1805, Keats's grandfather died. When the future poet was fourteen, his mother (after an unsuccessful remarriage) succumbed to tuberculosis. By then, however, Keats had received a liberal education at the progressive Clarke school, a private academy in the village of Enfield, twelve miles north of London, where for eight years he studied English literature, modern languages, and Latin. (He began translating Virgil's Aeneid while still at shcool.) Charles Cowden Clarke, the headmaster's son, remembered him as an outgoing youth who made friends easily and fought passionately in their defense. A fellow student recalled his pugnacious spirit: 'Keats was not in childhood attached to books. His penchant was for fighting. He would fight any one.' Yet George Keats spoke of his brother's 'nervous, morbid temperament' (perhaps attributable to a complex about being short—'poor little Johnny Keats' was barely five feet tall) and of his having 'many a bitter fit of hypochondriasm.' Indeed Keats himself wrote: 'My mind has been the most discontented and restless one that ever was put into a body too small for it.'\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1811 Keats left the Clarke school to become a surgeon's apprentice—first at Thomas Hammond's apothecary shop in a small town near Enfield and later in London at Guy's Hospital. (Surgery would have been a respectable and reasonable calling for someone of Keats's means: unlike the profession of medicine, it did not require a university degree. Moreover, Keats always maintained he was 'ambitious of doing the world some good.') During his five years of study for a license, the young apprentice completed his translation of the Aeneid and 'devoured rather than read' Ovid's \u003ci\u003eMetamorphoses,\u003c\/i\u003e Milton's \u003ci\u003eParadise Lost,\u003c\/i\u003e and other books he borrowed from the Clarke school. But the work that decisively awakened his love of poetry—indeed shocked him suddenly into self-awareness of his own powers of imagination—was Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. At some point in 1814 Keats composed his first poem, 'In Imitation of Spenser.' Although he struck medical colleagues as an 'idle loafing fellow, always writing poetry,' Keats passed the apothecaries' examination that allowed him to practice surgery on July 25, 1816. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the meantime, his poetic genius was being recognized and encouraged by early friends like Charles Cowden Clarke and J. H. Reynolds, and in October 1816 Clarke introduced him to Leigh Hunt, whose Examiner, the leading liberal magazine of the day, had recently published Keats's sonnet 'O Solitude.' Five months later, on March 3, 1817, \u003ci\u003ePoems,\u003c\/i\u003e his first volume of verse, appeared. Despite the high hopes of the Hunt circle, it was a failure. During the fall of that year, Keats stayed with Oxford student Benjamin Bailey at Magdalen College. While Bailey crammed for exams, Keats worked on \u003ci\u003eEndymion,\u003c\/i\u003e his four-thousand-line romantic allegory; the two read and discussed Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Milton, Dante, and Shakespeare. Back in London, on November 22, 1817, Keats wrote to Bailey the first of his famous letters to friends (and siblings) on aesthetics, the social role of poetry, and his own sense of poetic mission. Rarely has a poet left such a remarkable record of his thoughts on his own career and its relation to the history of poetry. (The letters also reveal the astonishing speed with which Keats matured as an artist.) Yet by the time Endymion was published in April 1818, Keats's name had been identified with Hunt's 'Cockney School,' and the Tory Blackwood's Magazine delivered a violent attack on Keats as an 'ignorant and unsettled pretender' to culture who had no right to aspire to poetry. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlthough the critical reaction to \u003ci\u003eEndymion\u003c\/i\u003e was infamous for its ferocity, the youthful bard was hardly destroyed by it—despite Byron's famous quip that Keats was 'snuffed out by an Article.' The surprising truth is that he entered upon an interval of astonishing productivity, perhaps the most concentrated period of creativity any English poet has ever known. In the summer of 1818, Keats journeyed to Scotland with Charles Brown, the rugged, worldly businessman who was one of his most loyal friends. There he vowed: 'I shall learn poetry here and shall henceforth write more than ever.' That fall he began composing \u003ci\u003eHyperion,\u003c\/i\u003e his imitation of and challenge to Milton's \u003ci\u003eParadise Lost;\u003c\/i\u003e even critics saw the work as a major achievement. In December, following his brother Tom's death from tuberculosis, Keats went to live with Charles Brown in Wentworth Place, Hampstead. There, almost in spite of himself, the young poet fell helplessly in love with Fanny Brawne, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a widowed neighbor; a year later they were betrothed. In 1819 Keats produced 'The Eve of St. Agnes,' 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci,' the major odes, Lamia, the Dantean dream-vision \u003ci\u003eThe Fall of Hyperion,\u003c\/i\u003e and the five-act verse tragedy \u003ci\u003eOtho the Great\u003c\/i\u003e (written in collaboration with Brown). \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn February 3, 1820, Keats suffered a pulmonary hemorrhage that signaled an advanced stage of tuberculosis. He quickly broke off his engagement and began what he called a -posthumous existence.' His career as a poet was effectively ended, although the volume \u003ci\u003eLamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems,\u003c\/i\u003e containing the bulk of Keats's claim to immortality, was published that July. In a desperate attempt to recover his health in a milder climate, Keats sailed for Italy in September accompanied by the painter Joseph Severn. Declining an invitation to stay with Shelley in Pisa, the two arrived in Rome on November 15 and took up residence in rooms overlooking the Piazza di Spagna. John Keats died in Rome on the night of February 23, 1821, and was buried there on February 26 in the Protestant Cemetery. On his deathbed Keats requested that his tombstone bear no name, only the words 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water.''Places of nestling green for Poets made.'\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStory of Rimini.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eI STOOD tip-toe upon a little hill, \u003cbr\u003eThe air was cooling, and so very still, \u003cbr\u003eThat the sweet buds which with a modest pride \u003cbr\u003ePull droopingly, in slanting curve aside, \u003cbr\u003eTheir scantly leav'd, and finely tapering stems, \u003cbr\u003eHad not yet lost those starry diadems \u003cbr\u003eCaught from the early sobbing of the morn. \u003cbr\u003eThe clouds were pure and white as flocks new shorn, \u003cbr\u003eAnd fresh from the clear brook; sweetly they slept \u003cbr\u003eOn the blue fields of heaven, and then there crept ———10\u003cbr\u003eA little noiseless noise among the leaves, \u003cbr\u003eBorn of the very sigh that silence heaves: \u003cbr\u003eFor not the faintest motion could be seen \u003cbr\u003eOf all the shades that slanted o'er the green. \u003cbr\u003eThere was wide wand'ring for the greediest eye, \u003cbr\u003eTo peer about upon variety; \u003cbr\u003eFar round the horizon's crystal air to skim, \u003cbr\u003eAnd trace the dwindled edgings of its brim; \u003cbr\u003eTo picture out the quaint, and curious bending \u003cbr\u003eOf a fresh woodland alley, never ending; ———20\u003cbr\u003eOr by the bowery clefts, and leafy shelves, \u003cbr\u003eGuess where the jaunty streams refresh themselves. \u003cbr\u003eI gazed awhile, and felt as light, and free \u003cbr\u003eAs though the fanning wings of Mercury \u003cbr\u003eHad play'd upon my heels: I was light-hearted, \u003cbr\u003eAnd many pleasures to my vision started; \u003cbr\u003eSo I straightway began to pluck a posey \u003cbr\u003eOf luxuries bright, milky, soft and rosy. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA bush of May flowers with the bees about them; \u003cbr\u003eAh, sure no tasteful nook would be without them; ———30\u003cbr\u003eAnd let a lush laburnum oversweep them, \u003cbr\u003eAnd let long grass grow round the roots to keep them \u003cbr\u003eMoist, cool and green; and shade the violets, \u003cbr\u003eThat they may bind the moss in leafy nets. \u003cbr\u003eA filbert hedge with wild briar overtwined, \u003cbr\u003eAnd clumps of woodbine taking the soft wind \u003cbr\u003eUpon their summer thrones; there too should be \u003cbr\u003eThe frequent chequer of a youngling tree, \u003cbr\u003eThat with a score of light green brethren shoots \u003cbr\u003eFrom the quaint mossiness of aged roots: ——— 40\u003cbr\u003eRound which is heard a spring-head of clear waters \u003cbr\u003eBabbling so wildly of its lovely daughters \u003cbr\u003eThe spreading blue-bells: it may haply mourn \u003cbr\u003eThat such fair clusters should be rudely torn \u003cbr\u003eFrom their fresh beds, and scattered thoughtlessly \u003cbr\u003eBy infant hands, left on the path to die. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOpen afresh your round of starry folds, \u003cbr\u003eYe ardent marigolds! \u003cbr\u003eDry up the moisture from your golden lids, \u003cbr\u003eFor great Apollo bids ——— 50\u003cbr\u003eThat in these days your praises should be sung \u003cbr\u003eOn many harps, which he has lately strung; \u003cbr\u003eAnd when again your dewiness he kisses, \u003cbr\u003eTell him, I have you in my world of blisses: \u003cbr\u003eSo haply when I rove in some far vale, \u003cbr\u003eHis mighty voice may come upon the gale. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHere are sweet peas, on tip-toe for a flight: \u003cbr\u003eWith wings of gentle flush o'er delicate white, \u003cbr\u003eAnd taper fingers catching at all things, \u003cbr\u003eTo bind them all about with tiny rings. ——— 60Introduction by Edward Hirsch","brand":"Modern Library","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302901141733,"sku":"NP9780375756696","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375756696.jpg?v=1767724002","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/complete-poems-and-selected-letters-of-john-keats-isbn-9780375756696","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}