John Keats: The Major Works: Including Endymion, the Odes and Selected Letters (Oxford World's Classics)

Great editing notes at end help elucidate Lifetime and Work of John Keats without interfering with actual text. Especially illuminating are the connections made between the Poet’s letters specific to the poems.

This is an excellent compilation of the Poet's work. The inclusion of the letters add to the understanding of his poetry and of his life with his interests, ideals and passions.

This review is of -John Keats: The Major Works-, edited by Elizabeth Cook (Oxford World's Classics) ISBN: 0192840630, 2001, 667 pp. There are now 3 major editions of the complete poems of John Keats. Each of them has its own excellencies. There is the -John Keats: Complete Poems-, edited by Jack Stillinger (Belknap Press, Harvard) ISBN: 0674154312, -John Keats: The Complete Poems-, edited by John Barnard (Penguin Classics) ISBN: 0140422102, and also this present volume, edited by Elizabeth Cook, ISBN: 0192840630. A fact which both John Barnard and Elizabeth Cook point out as editors is their debt, as well as the debt of all Keats scholars, to Jack Stillinger. As she says in her "Note on the Text": "In deciding which source text to use I am deeply indebted to Jack Stillinger who in -The Text of Keats's Poems- (1974) and in his subsequent edition of Keats's -Poems- (1978) presents his informed and considered arguments for and against each transcript and state of text. Prior to his work editors had frequently created Keats's poems from a patchwork of different source texts." The glories of this Oxford Classics edition are the same as with many of their editions, the fine "Introduction", the wondrous notes to the poems (pp. 557 - 641), an excellent selection of "Further Readings", Glossary of Classical Names, Index of Keats's Correspondents (with much helpful background information about them), and an Index of Poem Titles and First Lines. In this volume, there are also Appendix I, "St. Agnes' Eve" as found in George Keats's manuscript, and Appendix II, "La Belle Dame sans Mercy", as printed in the -Indicator-, 10 May 1820. Some editors and Keats lovers feel the changes that Keats made to the latter poem to publish in the -Indicator- mar the wondrous tone and atmosphere, so they print the first version. In her "Introduction," Elizabeth Cook stresses several important aspects of Keats's psyche and his reverences toward other authors (Spenser and Milton, in particular). From the side of the aspect of his psyche, she states: "Keats conceived of history as a process of *actualizing* the world's sum total of what is knowable and thinkable. In Stoic fashion he postulates a finite quantity of world-stuff of which Milton has used up an unfairly large portion, therby depleting not only his contemporaries, but posterity [later writers] as well. * * * He writes with the assumption that a certain quota of qualities, capacities, and experiences is allotted to each individual." In relating of Keats's sensitivity, sense of dedication, and love, she says: "In June 1818, when one brother, Tom, was dying of tuberculosis and the other, George, planning to sail with his new bride for America, Keats wrote to his friend Bailey, 'My Love for my Brothers from the early loss of our parents and even for earlier Misfortunes has grown into a affection "passing the Love of Women"." This was a section of verse from the Old Testament regarding the love of Jonathan, King Saul's son, and David, the exiled, hunted song singer, which Herman Melville was also attracted to. The formatting in this edition is very readable, the font is medium, not small, the layout of the pages is uncrowded and accessible, so that even with the longer poems one is not presented with a complicated task by smaller type. The excellence of this Oxford edition is the inclusion of 87 (!) of Keats's letters to various correspondents (pp. 348 - 543), as well as the prose pieces, "When Alexandre the Conquerore was wayfayring" (which according to the Notes was "Composed probably late 1815 while Keats was a student at Guy's [Hospital]. The only source for this fragment is Walter Cooper Dendy, -The Philosophy of Mystery- (London, 1841), pp. 99-100 where it is quoted at the end of a chapter on the pathology of 'Poetic Phantasy or Frenzy." The other prose pieces are "Keat's Marginalia to the Shakespeare Folio", "Keats's Marginalia to Milton's -Paradise Lost-", a piece on "Mr. Kean" [the actor], and the "Rejected Preface to -Endymion-." Keats's letters are a very valuable source of information of his views on poetry as a craft and an avocation, as well as providing commentary on his times. The only caution with these large-size Oxford Major Works is that one should be very careful not to crease the outside binding, as the pages if not sufficiently glued, might tend to come apart. Otherwise the Oxford Classics editons, and this one in particular, are treasured resources of fine works as well as extremely helpful scholarship. -- Robert Kilgore.

I have checked through to see that it has the poems I have previously enjoyed, and look forward to reading new ones.

Very good! Thank you very much!