'Hoodwink'd in faery fancy...' This volume contains a selection of Keats' greatest verse — including his gothic story in verse, The Eve of St Agnes, and the mysterious 'Lamia' — exploring themes of love, enchantment, myth and magic. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. John Keats (1795-1821). Keats' works available in Penguin Classics are Selected Poems, So Bright and Delicate: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne, The Complete Poems and Selected Letters.

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination.' One of the most popular of the Romantic poets, Keats' poetry is suffused with adoration for natural beauty, exploration of joy and pain, and ideas on the transience of life. This new collection combines many of Keats' well-loved poems — from 'Ode to a Nightingale' to 'Bright Star' — with his letters, often studied, analysed and admired in parallel and offering a fascinating insight into the life and mind of the famous poet. Despite a lack of recognition during his own lifetime, Keats' work has touched the hearts and minds of many, and deserves its place in the canon of English literature.

«This is an entirely new selection of Keats's finest poetry containing all his best known work as well as a sample of less familiar pieces. Keats published three volumes of poetry before his death at age twenty-five of tuberculosis and, while many of his contemporaries were prompt to recognize his greatness, snobbery and political hostility led the Tory press to vilify and patronize him as a «Cockney poet.» Financial anxieties and the loss of those he loved most had tried him persistently, yet he dismissed the concept of life as a vale of tears and substituted the concept of a «vale of Soul-making.» His poetry and his remarkable letters reveal a spirit of questing vitality and profound understanding and his final volume, which contains the great odes and the unfinished Hyperion, attests to an astonishing maturity of power.»

Keats's letters have long been regarded as an extraordinary record of poetic development. According to T. S. Eliot, Keats's letters are the most notable and most important ever written by any English poet. They represent one of the most sustained reflections on the poet's art we have from any of the major English poets. Yet quite apart from the light they throw on the poetry, they are great works of literature in their own right. Written with gusto and occasionally painful candor, they show a powerful intelligence struggling to come to terms with its own mortality. Sometimes bitterly jealous in love and socially and financially insecure, at others playful and confident of his own greatness, Keats interweaves his personal plight with the history of a Britain emerging from the long years of the Napoleonic Wars into a world of political unrest, profound social change, and commercial expansion.

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 sequence, 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.

A collection of poems by John Keats, which includes Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Hyperion.