Letters of John Keats: A Selection

John Keats

Oxford University Press, 1970 - Biography & Autobiography - 417 pages

Written in a fraction over four years, 1816 to 1820, the large body of Keats's letters forms the most complete portrait we have of any English poet. With extraordinary candour and self-knowledge Keats gives us his experience of almost everything that can happen to a young man between the agesof twenty-one and twenty-five; an all but day-to-day account of the working processes of a poet; and finally as Robert Gittings says, 'some of the most profound comments on art, philosophy, and the human condition that any single person has produced'. Robert Gittings has selected 170 letters, each printed in full, with invaluable explanatory notes, and an Appendix containing new readings and textual discoveries based on his own study of the manuscripts.

Contents

• To George and Tom Keats: 6
• October 1816: 25
• October: 31

About the author

Keats was born in London, the oldest of four children. His father, who was a livery-stable keeper, died when Keats was 8 years old, and his mother died six years later. At age 15, he was apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon. In 1815 he began studying medicine but soon gave up that career in favor of writing poetry. The critic Douglas Bush has said that, if one poet could be recalled to life to complete his career, the almost universal choice would be Keats, who now is regarded as one of the three or four supreme masters of the English language. His early work is badly flawed in both technique and critical judgment, but, from his casually written but brilliant letters, one can trace the development of a genius who, through fierce determination in the face of great odds, fashioned himself into an incomparable artist. In his tragically brief career, cut short at age 25 by tuberculosis, Keats constantly experimented, often with dazzling success, and always with steady progress over previous efforts. The unfinished Hyperion is the only English poem after Paradise Lost that is worthy to be called an epic, and it is breathtakingly superior to his early Endymion (1818), written just a few years before. Isabella is a fine narrative poem, but The Eve of St. Agnes (1819), written soon after, is peerless. In Lamia (1819) Keats revived the couplet form, long thought to be dead, in a gorgeous, romantic story. Above all it was in his development of the ode that Keats's supreme achievement lies. In just a few months, he wrote the odes "On a Grecian Urn" (1819), "To a Nightingale" (1819), "To Melancholy" (1819), and the marvelously serene "To Autumn" (1819). Keats is the only romantic poet whose reputation has steadily grown through all changes in critical fashion. Once patronized as a poet of beautiful images but no intellectual content, Keats is now appreciated for his powerful mind, profound grasp of poetic principles, and ceaseless quest for new forms and techniques. For many readers, old and young, Keats is a heroic figure.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Letters of John Keats: A Selection; Nelson classics; Oxford letters & memoirs; Oxford paperbacks
• Author: John Keats
• Editor: Robert Gittings
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1970
• Original from: the University of Virginia
• Digitized: Aug 25, 2008
• ISBN: 0192810812, 9780192810816
• Length: 417 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Historical; Biography & Autobiography / Literary Figures; Literary Collections / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Literary Collections / Letters; Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Literary Criticism / Poetry; Poetry / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh