Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats

Description

The complete collection of poems and a selection of the most important letters of the wildly imaginativve romanic poet, with a new introduction by National Book Critics Circle award winning poet, Edward Hirsh

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.' In 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 Metamorphoses, Milton's Paradise Lost, 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. In 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, Poems, 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 Endymion, 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 Blackwo

"No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness."