Selected Poems [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION In a letter to his sister, the English novelist George Gis-sing once remarked: "Of Keats read everything. To like Keats is a test of fitness for understanding poetry, just as to like Shakespeare is a test of general mental capacity." One cannot readily quarrel v^^ith Gissing's suggestion. To read everything of Keats gives interesting information about the way a poet develops. A reader can watch the stages, month by month, of Keats' groping attempts to embody the conception of poetry early stated in his "Sleep and Poetry" and can trace out the gradual mellowing of his style into die perfection of his best odes and narratives and of the epic, "Hyperion." Yet such a reading, however interesting, also sacrifices something by its emphasis on minor details. Many of the poems in Keats' collected works are experiments, and attract us only as tentative explorations rather than for their intrinsic value. They are also the experiments of a very young writer. It cannot be repeated too often that almost everything this poet wrote was composed before he reached his twenty-fourth birthday, an age at which most poets have written little of any worth. Consequently there is justification for approaching Keats through a volume of selections. The present selections enable the reader to follow out the main outline of Keats' development and yet to concentrate attention on his major achievement. In his last years at school, John Keats suddenly became keenly interested in reading. His first enthusiasm was for translations of classical literature, and through these he developed a frame of reference from the stories of Greece and Rome upon which he draws extensively in his poems. Later, while he was studying to become a surgeon, his real inclination was for reading poetry, especially that of Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and of his ovm contemporaries Wordsworth, and Leigh Hunt. vii i;l i: . 1-. I