John Keats: Selected Poems

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Penguin Books Limited, 1999 M10 28 - 233 páginas
"An 'ignorant and unsettled pretender' to culture and a 'bantling' who has 'already learned to lisp sedition'."
It was in these terms that the Tory Blackwood's Magazinereviled Keats's poetry in 1818. This is not to imply that Keats (1795-1821) was, like Shelley, a political poet. Indeed, he is the 'one great English Romantic poet whose prime belief was in art and beauty'. Love, art, sorrow, the natural world and the nature of the imagination are the preoccupying themes of his poetry. However, as John Barnard shows in this selection, Keats's poetry is often indirectly critical of conventional political, religious and sexual beliefs. In his Introduction he discusses the focus of the volume, which emphasises Keats's place as a 'second-generation Romantic'. While Keats sought to embody in his work the 'dreams of art', he was also aware of the limitations of the claims of poetry and the imagination and remained deeply conscious of human suffering.

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Acerca del autor (1999)

John Keats (1795-1821) is one of the greatest English poets and a key figure in the Romantic Movement. He has become the epitome of the young, beautiful, doomed poet. He wrote, among others, 'The Eve of St Agnes', 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci', 'Ode to a Nightingale' and 'To Autumn'. The group of five odes, which include 'Ode to a Nightingale', are ranked among the greatest short poems in the English language. John Keats was born in October 1795, son of the manager of a livery stable in Moorfields. His father died in 1804 and his mother, of tuberculosis, in 1810. By then he had received a good education at John Clarke's Enfield private school. In 1811 he was apprenticed to a surgeon, completing his professional training at Guy's Hospital in 1816. His decision to commit himself to poetry rather than a medical career was a courageous one, based more on a challenge to himself than any actual achievement. His genius was recognized and encouraged by early Mends like Charles Cowden Clarke and J. H. Reynolds, and in October 1816 he met Leigh Hunt, whose Examiner had already published Keats's first poem. Only seven months later Poems (1817) appeared. Despite the high hopes of the Hunt circle, it was a failure. By the time Endymion was published in 1818 Keats's name had been identified with Hunt's 'Cockney School', and the Tory Blackwood's Magazine delivered a violent attack on Keats as a lower-class vulgarian, with no right to aspire to 'poetry'. But for Keats fame lay not in contemporary literary politics but with posterity. Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth were his inspiration and challenge. The extraordinary speed with which Keats matured is evident from his letters. In 1818 he had worked on the powerful epic fragment Hyperion, and in 1819 he wrote 'The Eve of St

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