| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details
|
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Although it does not include any of the letters Keats is also known to have written, the volume of poetry makes up for this, and truly there are some wonderful choices made in the verse included. The reader is able to enjoy Keats' love of the fantastical, his heavily opiumed obsession with perfection and immortality of love, and the God and Goddesses he uses to illustrate his feelings on love, life and the constant battles he had against the 'Classical' poets of the time. The struggles between Classicalism and Romanticism hover behind several of the poems, as do his feeling about women and his own introspections on life and love. But don't be thinking this is all heavy going poetry, because to just be read without analysis is also to enjoy the beauty of his poems, as they are full of powerful visions of nature and colour and love. You can't help but enjoy them. Of course, they are going to appeal to you more strongly if you are of a Romantic nature yourself...if you are a hopeless Romantic, this is the book for you!
Since I first read this book, Keats has become my favourite poet. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
Barnard writes that the poetry of John Keats is uniformly serious and always poetic. Keats' prime concern was art and beauty. The casual reader may not even notice certain passages that resulted in severe political criticism by the Tory press and other supporters of Charles II.
The real popularity of this particular collection is the poetry of Keats himself. Barnard has assembled an excellent collection, one that is fully representative of Keats' remarkable genius. He largely avoided the longer poems of John Keats with the exception of Endymion in which he offers Book 1 in its entirety, but only extracts from Books 2, 3, and 4. Nonetheless, this abridged version of Endymion still exceeds 2000 lines.
Looking for alternative collections? John Barnard has also compiled John Keats, The Complete Poems. It was also published by Penguin Classics. It is about 750 pages, more than three times as long as Selected Poems. For example, the full Endymion is some 50 pages longer than the abridged version in Selected Poems. Barnard's explanatory notes in this collection are quite extensive, totaling nearly 200 pages in reduced print size. There is also a wide ranging appendix exceeding 50 pages, including selected letters of John Keats.
Another good choice is published by Modern Library. Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats is actually a very good choice and is indeed my favorite. The introduction by John Hirsch is more than 25 pages and is quite helpful. I particularly like the explanatory notes by Jim Pollock. They are less extensive than those in Barnard's The Complete Poems, but I found them most useful.
|
|