Product Description

This Norton Critical Edition seeks to return Keats—one of the most beloved poets of the English language—to his cultural moment by tracking his emergence as a public poet. For this reason, this volume presents the writings in the order of publication rather than composition. Readers can trace the poems through letters, reviews, and related material chronologically interleaved with the texts themselves. This edition offers extensive apparatus to help readers fully appreciate Keats’s poetry and legacy, including an introduction, headnotes, explanatory annotations, and a wealth of contextual documents. “Criticism” includes twelve important commentaries on Keats and his poetry, by Paul de Man, Marjorie Levinson, Grant F. Scott, Margaret Homans, Nicholas Roe, Stuart Sperry, Neil Fraistat, Jack Stillinger, James Chandler, Alan Bewell, and Jeffrey N. Cox. .

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #74603 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 640 pages

About the Author
Jeffrey N. Cox is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of The Center for Humanities and the Arts at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is author of Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Shelley, Keats, Hunt, and Their Circle and In the Shadows of Romance: Romantic Tragic Drama in Germany, England, and France. His edited books include Romantic Drama: An Anthology (co-edited with Michael Garner); Slavery, Abolition, and Emancipation in the British Romantic Period, Volume 5: The Drama; New Historical Literary Study (co-edited with Larry Reynolds); and Seven Gothic Dramas, 1789–1825.

Customer Reviews

Excellent Anthology
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.

A superb Keats 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's death at the absurdly young age of 25 has a truly visceral 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 closely observe Keats's growth as a poet, almost before one's eyes and in accelerated real-time. A feeling of intimacy with Keats soon develops in the reader as the teenaged poet blossoms with stunning rapidity. We experience the expansion and deepening of his world view and witness Keats's lightning maturation in 1819 as the tragic sense of life informs his artistry, resulting in an incandescent burst of creativity. The result of this artistic growth was the publication the following year of the greatest volume of poetry of the 19th Century: Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems. In it were the great spring odes of 1819, including the iconic Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn and To Autumn.

Keats has by his early maturity reached a level of writing that is visceral in its immediacy, and that contains a warmth and ripeness of imagery that is unique in English literature. His poetry is richly verdant and heavily laden with the verbal equivalence of succulent and aromatic fruit, a fecund harvest of living beauty. It is one of the pleasures of the Norton Critical Edition that we have a sense of both the development of this poetic greatness as well as its possible future direction had the poet not succumbed at such an early age. A three-dimensional and living man lives within these pages, his thoughts and desires, his dreams and his hopes. Once the poet takes shape before your eyes you will never read his poetry in the same way again. This is a masterful anthology, beautifully prepared. Strongly recommended.

Mike Birman