The Major Works: Including Endymion, the Odes and Selected Letters

by John Keats, Elizabeth Cook (Editor)

This authoritative edition was originally published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique combination of Keats's poetry and prose - all the major poems, complemented by a generous selection of Keats's letters - to
give the essence of his work and thinking.

In his tragically short life Keats wrote an astonishing number of superb poems; his stature as one of the foremost poets of the Romantic movement remains unassailable. This volume contains all the poetry published during his lifetime, including Endymion in its entirety, the Odes, "Lamia", and both
versions of "Hyperion." The poetry is presented in chronological order , illustrating the staggering speed with which Keats's work matured. Further insight into his creative process is given by reproducing, in their original form, a number of poems that were published posthumously.

Keats's letters are admired almost as much as his poetry and were described by T. S. Eliot as "certainly the most notable and most important ever written by any English poet." They provide the best biographical detail available and shed invaluable light on Keats's poems.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Fiction, Romanticism, 19th Century, British Literature, School

704 pages, Paperback

First published May 24, 2001

About the author

Rich melodic works in classical imagery of British poet John Keats include " The Eve of Saint Agnes ," " Ode on a Grecian Urn ," and " To Autumn ," all in 1819.

Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley include "Adonais," an elegy of 1821 to John Keats.

Work of the principal of the Romantic movement of England received constant critical attacks from the periodicals of the day during his short life. He nevertheless posthumously immensely influenced poets, such as Alfred Tennyson. Elaborate word choice and sensual imagery characterize poetry, including a series of odes, masterpieces of Keats among the most popular poems in English literature. Most celebrated letters of Keats expound on his aesthetic theory of "negative capability."

Wikipedia page of the author

Reviews

[Flynn William · Rating 5 out of 5]

lovely

[Md Azmir Fakir · Rating 4 out of 5]

Keats's letters are admired almost as much as his poetry and were described by T. S. Eliot as "certainly the most notable and most important ever written by any English poet." They provide the best biographical detail available and shed invaluable light on Keats's poems.

[Anne-Sofie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Completely in love with 'Ode to a Nightingale' - beautiful, just beautiful.

[Jack Caulfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

First time properly reading Keats. I enjoyed this edition's inclusion of both the poems and the letters. They're printed in separate sections, but I tended to flick back and forth between letters and poems in order to read things in roughly chronological order. The letters were my favourite part; Keats is so funny and alive and impassioned in them. And then the final letters are heartbreaking. Of the poems, my favourites were the two versions of 'Hyperion', 'This living hand ...', and the odes, particularly 'Indolence'. 'Endymion' is justly maligned.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Keats, on his birthday October 31
“I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.” John Keats
Passion and faith, truth and deception, redemption and illusion, vision and the creative power of love; John Keats maps a course of transcendence through his poetry as a dream quest for the Ideal and for Beauty.
His poetry negotiates the complex relationships of his clustered and interdependent themes, in a coded philosophy of imagination and human meaning and value.
In works of exquisite beauty and refinement he grappled with the angels and with the darkness of death and grief, suffering and the limits of a deeply flawed humanity to win a path of redemption for us all.
His principle of Negative Capability- that of transcending oneself and identifying with the Other, a mystical unification of artist and subject- is drawn metaphorically from his idea of love and the Beloved. He thinks by metaphor, and so jumps categories to imagine the world anew.
For John Keats, the act of writing or any creative art is transcendental in nature; and so his poetry of love for an Ideal which proves either redemptive or illusory. As a primary ironic paradox, the truth or falseness of Ideals and the love which may make them real became a driving theme of his poetics of passion and of faith.
Endymion, a reply to Shelley's Alastor which may be read together as companion poems, explores the interplay of erotic and spiritual love, the human and the divine, and the possibilities for the realization of the Ideal in the flesh.
On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again, in which he turns to tragedy for insight and returns to Shakespeare as a source, John Keats reimagines Shakespeare's themes of death, time, and art, and realigns his sonnet form similarly.
Hyperion, though fragmentary, is an incontestable Great Book and classic; in this the influence of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, Milton's Paradise Lost, and his admiration of Wordsworth may be seen. In his version of the myth of the Fall of the Titans, John Keats centers the poem on the conflict of Hyperion and Apollo, a duality which seems Nietzschean to me, but also references the French Revolution and the great hero of humanism Napoleon; and on a third level is an expository fable of artisitc vision and creativity.
The Eve of St. Agnes, among the finest poems written in English, a reimagination of Romeo and Juliet and other medieval romances, ignites in stellar glory a myth of passion, love, faith, illusion, the power of wishes and the transformational force of dreams. It is nothing less than a rite of initiation and a guide through the gates of the Infinite.
La Belle Dame sans Merci is a haunting ballad which recalls Arthurian Romance and its doomed lovers, seductions and entrapments; Merlin and Nimue, Lancelot and Guinevere, and the earlier Tristan and Iseult. It marks the turn of John Keats toward recognition of the interdependence of beauty as illusion with evil, lies, and death; with darkness and chaos as the balance to beauty as truth, faith, and love, and the highly contingent and subjective nature of reality.
His great odes- Ode to Psyche, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, To Autumn- form together an apex achievement of poetry and are irreducible to their natures, like the immortality of a Philosopher's Stone. Densely constructed, highly polished, and intensely imagined, this group of works may be examined as a system of thought unto itself, the result of a hero's journey and similar to the alchemical studies on which Jung based his psychology.
There is much to be learned about becoming human from the poems of John Keats; in a language of fragile beauty he conducts an interrogation of Beauty with depth, rigor, and a fearless vision.

[Milo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Legend tells of a poet who came fresh out the womb, slick with amniotic goo, quill in still-grasping hand, who set immediately upon his first Ode – in which he describes, quite intimately, the scarlet conclave out which he came. We imagine, then, the next two decades of industry with some amaze: look at the balls on this kid! Only for his book to drown too soon. O, lost scion of beauty’s pungent fruit! But I find this account dubious in certain regards, not least biological. Though those reasons I will not enter into print. Instead, the notion of the Immediate Genius. In fact, a large swathe of Keats’ poetry is not especially good. Much passable, of course, much in the vein of a capable poet, much even speckled (if only speckled) with genius. But if he were to have died just a few months earlier his reputation would rest on very little indeed; perhaps Adonais alone would carry him to glory, by reflection. Take, for instance, the disaster of Endymion. Not without fragments of glory. It begins with a fragment of glory, and sometimes dips its head in those moon-struck ponds. But elsewhere it is a great mess of description, losing in the verdure all sense of motion and of narrative; the huge ambition seems to eat itself, and the thing moves along with slug-like temerity. Prior to Endymion he is a poet in search of a subject; so many of his verses speak only of verses; his is a cinema of camera equipment, close shots of lenses and operators. How beautiful is the thing that makes beauty! A pertinent idea, often resumed, but also speaking of a poet without much yet to speak of, save his love of poetry. A few find purchase on this theme (‘The Elgin Marbles’; ‘Chapman’s Homer’), though most blend into an endless and endlessly vague encomium. The less said of his Burns-esque comic verse I should think the better. It ought to be remembered, naturally, that the whole of Keats’ career – beginning with or without amniotic goo – takes place in any other poet’s juvenilia; that he wrote any considerable verse in these years can be seen, in that reflection, as remarkable. But then there is the Keats miracle: the point at which he matures with lightning speed: the moment he seems – and really, the moment – to discover an age of wisdom. On the writing of the Odes – to Psyche and beyond – he becomes a great poet. Here he is no longer flecked with glory but bathed in it; here each poem seems to point to an ever greater object. He writes the greatest ever poem written about an urn, and then writes another – yet greater. My first combined reading of ‘Nightingale’ and ‘Urn’ likely remarks the most moved I have ever been by lyric poetry; in those poems is such a span of feeling, experience, beauty. Sprouting, somehow, from the mind who so recently wrote the gruesome – endearing – but quite juvenile ‘Isabella’; suddenly we dart not into cleverness, or a work of wit and device, but some other, more piercing mood. Much is spoken of Keats’ preoccupation with death, though I feel it is only in his later and greater poems that this feeling is particularly common; it is an effect not of obsession but of emphasis. It is placed in the right spots that we might feel it to resemble his whole poetic spirit which, when given this ample comparison, is in fact divided in many personae, even if cut short before proper maturation. Most tragic in his dying is, of course, The Fall of Hyperion, whose beginning fragment is so vivid in its imagery and its scope; here, versus Endymion, is an enormous advance in narrative and linguistic clarity: the object is not a wash of all mythology spun up with Miltonic gardening, but a more pointed and more specific theme. The former Hyperion is inferior, but not without its quality, nor some hint of his intended – fascinating – narrative drift. But we are left with unheard melodies: perhaps of all poets who died young, it was Keats who best prepared his exit.

[Peter De Kinder · Rating 3 out of 5]

Since this is a comprehensive collection of most of Keats's work, I cannot say I liked all of it. For those wanting to read poetry, they should stop when reaching the section with his letters. For me, they were nice to read, but I can imagine them being of more value to those actually studying the meaning behind his poems instead of just reading them for enjoyment.

[Keeko · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even though he's playing and working with words to express his ideas, it feels like there is no gap between the words and what's inside of him. So many of his lines and thoughts knock me over. He's so full of energy and heart, even at the end. I wanted to give him a hug.
Thanks to the team that worked on this. You should be very proud. It's beautiful.

[Ana Paola · Rating 5 out of 5]

Im so in love with John’s writing style, it’s so mesmerizing. I used to read one poem for each moment that wasn’t great for me and my mental health, it really helped me to get rid of all those intrusive and negative thoughts.

[Anastasia Hale · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favorite poem: "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

[Joyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

this keats kid was going places, wonder what happened to him

[ZaRi]

1.
In thy western halls of gold
When thou sittest in thy state,
Bards, that erst sublimely told
Heroic deeds, and sang of fate,
With fervour seize their adamantine lyres,
Whose chords are solid rays, and twinkle radiant fires.

2.
Here Homer with his nervous arms
Strikes the twanging harp of war,
And even the western splendour warms,
While the trumpets sound afar:
But, what creates the most intense surprise,
His soul looks out through renovated eyes.

3.
Then, through thy Temple wide, melodious swells
The sweet majestic tone of Maro's lyre:
The soul delighted on each accent dwells,--
Enraptur'd dwells,--not daring to respire,
The while he tells of grief around a funeral pyre.

4.
'Tis awful silence then again;
Expectant stand the spheres;
Breathless the laurell'd peers,
Nor move, till ends the lofty strain,
Nor move till Milton's tuneful thunders cease,
And leave once more the ravish'd heavens in peace.

5.
Thou biddest Shakespeare wave his hand,
And quickly forward spring
The Passions--a terrific band--
And each vibrates the string
That with its tyrant temper best accords,
While from their Master's lips pour forth the inspiring words.

6.
A silver trumpet Spenser blows,
And, as its martial notes to silence flee,
From a virgin chorus flows
A hymn in praise of spotless Chastity.
'Tis still! Wild warblings from the Aeolian lyre
Enchantment softly breathe, and tremblingly expire.

7.
Next thy Tasso's ardent numbers
Float along the pleased air,
Calling youth from idle slumbers,
Rousing them from Pleasure's lair:--
Then o'er the strings his fingers gently move,
And melt the soul to pity and to love.

8.
But when Thou joinest with the Nine,
And all the powers of song combine,
We listen here on earth:
Thy dying tones that fill the air,
And charm the ear of evening fair,
From thee, great God of Bards, receive their heavenly birth.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a third way through this... currently reading the long poem Endymion, 8 lines at a time. I was not an English major, always thought the Romantics would be tough going, but I'm surprised at how readable Keats is, line by line, and just how lovely these poems are, even the 100 page Endymion--you read and then you come across a line that just takes the wind out of you... And I don't mind cheating at all--I think if I hadn't read up on the poem, I wouldn't know WHAT the hell it was about--a youth's love for the MOON! OHHhh, okay. Lots of personifying of natural phenomena in mythological figures--his feeling for nature is intense and personal and passionate. Not one scrap of irony anywhere--what a breath of sweet air. And anybody who appreciates the music of language--it's like stumbling upon Mozart and finally giving him a chance.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant collection of Keats's most beautiful works and most moving letters. I can't rave enough about how much I love Keats, so I'll just let you read for yourself.

[Prakash Bisht · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aesthetic, mesmerising, fantabulous, literally an opiate for me at times. I can't describe him in words, just read his works and find words for him.

[Mii · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a great read!

[M.I. Lastman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've never been much of a fan of Keats. His poetry seems a little bloodless to me.

[marneleigh]

Read the Odes and Letters only.