Ode to Psyche and Other Poems: (Salt Modern Poets)

John Keats has come to be regarded as one of the most significant poets of the Romantic movement. His work has had a lasting impact on all those who came after him, especially the Victorians. Yet during his lifetime his work was derided and his books sold poorly. Mocked by Byron, yet supported by Shelley, his importance only became clear as the Victorians began to read him, and as they came to characterise him as a sensual, dreamy poet of the imagination, capable of vivid depictions of passionate, physical engagement with the world. It took the critics ot the twentieth century to extend our understanding of Keats’s critical abilities and his complex grasp of human conflict and aesthetic issues, and to see a politically engaged and sexually charged writer. This selection of Keats’s poetry presents all his major lyrics, espcially the great odes, along with poems selected from all parts of the writer’s brief traumatic life. Selected by Chris Emery and published to coincide with National Poetry Month, April 2009.

Table of Contents:
To Some Ladies `Give me women, wine and snuff’ On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer `In drear nighted December’ On Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair `When I have fears that I may cease to be’ Robin Hood Lines on the Mermaid Tavern `Four Seasons fill the measure of the year’ `’Tis the “witching time of night”` `And what is love?? It is a doll dressed up’ Fancy Ode [`Bards of passion and of mirth’] The Eve of St. Agnes La Belle Dame Sans Merci To Sleep `Fame, like a wayward girl, will still be coy’ Ode to Psyche `If by dull rhymes our English must be chained’ Ode to a Nightingale Ode on a Grecian Urn Ode on Melancholy Ode on Indolence `Pensive they sit and roll their languid eyes’ To Autumn `The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone’ `Bright star?! Would I were steadfast as thou art’

About the Author :
John Keats was born in Moorgate, London in 1795. In 1810 Keats's mother died of tuberculosis. In 1810 Keats's mother died of tuberculosis. The following year Keats was apprenticed to the surgeon Thomas Hammond. Keats's brother, Tom, soon developed tuberculosis, dying in 1818. Keats moved again to live with his friend, Charles Armitage Brown, in Hampstead. Over the next three years Keats wrote all his major poems in an extraordinary burst of creative activity. In 1820 he developed tuberculosis and soon left London for Italy. He took lodgings on the Piazza di Spagna, in Rome, but his health rapidly deteriorated and he died in February 1821. He is buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.