John Keats

Keats died the youngest of the great English romantic poets, and his writing career occupied an extraordinarily brief span from his twenieth to his twenty-fifth year. Throughout his creative life he struggled, through reading, through intensive thought and through experiment with different genres and metrical structures, towards the development of his poetics and his personal self. This striving towards maturity, ?by growing away from unreflecting delight in external nature into a...
More Description

Keats died the youngest of the great English romantic poets, and his writing career occupied an extraordinarily brief span from his twenieth to his twenty-fifth year. Throughout his creative life he struggled, through reading, through intensive thought and through experiment with different genres and metrical structures, towards the development of his poetics and his personal self. This striving towards maturity, ?by growing away from unreflecting delight in external nature into a wise understanding of the harsher realities of existence? is epitomized in his lines from Hyperion.

The poet and the dreamer are distinct?

The one pours out a balm upon the world,

The other vexes it.

Professor Allott?s essay traces this traces this process of evolution through a detailed survey of Keats?s narrative poems, odes, sonnets and other lyrics; it also discusses the Letters in relation to Keats?s personality, his poetic values and his critical ideas. This essay succeeds the late Edmund Blunden?s in this series.

Professor Miriam Allott succeeded to the Andrew Cecil Bradley Chair of Modern English Literature at University of Liverpool, after the death of her husband Kenneth Allott, the former Bradley Professor. She edited the first annotated edition of the complete poems of John Keats (1970).