A Greeting Of The Spirit

A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year A renowned Keats scholar illuminates the poet’s extraordinary career in a new edition featuring seventyeight verse selections with commentary. John Keats’s career as a published poet spanned scarcely more than four years cut short by his death early in 1821 at age twentyfive. Yet in this time he produced a remarkable—and remarkably wideranging—body of work that has secured his place as one of the most influential poets in the British literary tradition. Celebrated Keats scholar Susan J. Wolfson presents seventyeight selections from his work each accompanied by a commentary on its form style meanings and relevant contexts. In this edition readers will rediscover a virtuoso poet by turns lively experimental selfironizing outrageous and philosophical. Wolfson includes such wellknown favorites as Ode to a Nightingale Ode on a Grecian Urn To Autumn La Belle Dame sans Merci and The Eve of St. Agnes as well as less familiar poems several in letters to family and friends never meant for publication. Her selections redefine the breadth and depth of Keats’s poetic imagination from intellectual jests and satires to erotic bandying passionate confessions and reflections on mortality. The selections presented in their order of composition convey a chronicle of Keats’s artistic and personal evolution. Wolfson’s revealing commentaries unfold the lively complexities of his verbal arts and stylistic experiments his earnest goals and nervous apprehensions and the pressures of politics and literary criticism in his day. In critically attentive and conversational prose Wolfson encourages us to experience Keats in the way that he himself imagined the language of poetry as a living event a cooperative experience shared between author and reader.