Introduction by David Bromwich
John Keats is regarded as the quintessential English Romantic poet: lyrical, passionate, tender, dreamy, sensuous. The only thing more miraculous than his brief career-in which, from the age of eighteen until his death a mere seven years later, he produced a substantial number of the greatest poems in English-are those poems themselves. Nowhere has the pressure of human imagination been brought more powerfully to bear on our mortal condition than in his great narratives and narrative fragments, his sonnets of discovery, and his magnificent odes. The Everyman edition of the poems presents a reordered and reedited version of the complete text with detailed notes to every poem, as well as a chronology and bibliography.
