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Keats's Poetry and Prose (Norton Critical Editions)

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Even if you have a complete edition of Keats's poetry (and Stillinger's is the best edition out there), I would recommend this anthology. Arranging the poems in the order they reached publication or in the order of the volume each poem was originally published in (with advertisements and all), this anthology grants the Keats reader a differing and important angle to read his poetry. The criticism in the back is top-notch, including the a chapter from Neil Fraisat's THE POEM AND THE BOOK which argues for the artful arrangement of Keats's 1820 volume, a piece Cox included to justify the placement of the poetry.

Because Keats, in letters and poetry, responded to the contemporary criticism, Cox places all contemporaneous reviews in the order they were published, along with interspersing letters to and from Keats chronologically.

An excellent anthology.

The very name of John Keats is a metaphor for genius tragically interrupted. When one considers that Mozart lived a full decade longer than the precocious young poet, the realization of what was lost with Keats' death at the absurdly young age of 25 has a powerful impact. This Norton Critical Edition of his poetry and prose is arranged with the poems in order as they entered into print and the unpublished poems arranged by date of composition. Letters and assorted prose are also interleaved chronologically. The reader can observe Keats's growth as a poet, almost before one's eyes and in accelerated real-time. I found myself developing something like an intimate connection with Keats as I read his letters. In them he describes the experiences that will soon find immortality in his poems. We share the expansion and deepening of his world view. Keats matured with stunning rapidity in 1819 following the death of his brother. He developed a tragic sense of life which resulted in an incandescent burst of creativity. The fruits of Keats' rapid artistic maturity was the publication in the following year of the greatest volume of poetry of the 19th Century: 'Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems'. It contained the great spring odes of 1819, including the iconic Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn and To Autumn.

Keats' mature poetry is sensual and visceral. It contains a richness of imagery that is unique in English literature, with language that has an autumnal beauty of great emotional power. It is one of the better features of the Norton Critical Edition that we get a sense of both the development of this poetic greatness as well as its possible future direction had Keats not succumbed at such an early age. A three-dimensional living man seems to live within these pages: his thoughts and desires, his dreams and his hopes are in the poetry and prose presented here. Once Keats takes shape before your eyes you will never read his poetry in the same way again. This is an excellent anthology with some well-chosen critical background material supplementing Keats' own work. Strongly recommended.

Mike Birman

Keats died so young, and so long ago. We call folks of that time Romantic, but they were not sentimental, or necessarily lovers. They cared with a new intensity about the interior life of the individual, and we in our culture to this day are their children. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree; where ignorance is bliss 'tis folly to be wise; a cloud of lovely daffodils; beauty is truth, truth beauty: so many wonderful lines from the English Romantics. But Keats thought the hardest about the mind and its place in the world around it, and he wrote the best. The great odes, enormously subtle, enormously suggesting of the truths very difficult to put into words, they are from Keats. Well worth enjoying, and well worth grappling with. The Norton Critical Editions offer excellent supporting material, both from the time of the writing and from our own time, dependable texts of the writings, in a well designed and manufactured book. Will give pleasure in many moods, on many levels.