John Keats is regarded as one of the greatest poets of the Romantic movement. But when he died at the age of only twenty-five, his writing had been attacked by critics and his talent remained largely unrecognized. Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is edited and introduced by Dr Andrew Hodgson.This volume, Selected Poems, reflects his extraordinary creativity and versatility, drawing on the collections published during his lifetime as well as posthumously. He wrote in many different forms – from his famous Odes to ballads such as ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, and the epic Hyperion. Together, they celebrate a poet who wrote with unsurpassed insight and emotion about art and beauty, love and loss, suffering and nature.

The imaginative impact of Keats’s life – his “orphaned” childhood, his letters, his poetry, his friendships, his illness, his agonizing love affair – has continued unbroken for nearly two hundred years, Keats’s jazz-like improvisations, which give us, like no other writing in English, the actual rush of a man thinking, a mind hurtling forward unpredictably and sweeping us along, He left behind him some of Britain’s best-loved poetry, A truly radical poet

John Keats was born in London in 1795. He and his siblings were orphaned at a young age – his father died in a riding accident in 1804 and his mother died six years later. Keats then left school to train as an apothecary and a surgeon before dedicating his time to poetry. His first volume, Poems, was published in 1817 and only two more volumes, in 1818 and 1820, were published during his lifetime. In 1818 he fell in love with his neighbour Fanny Brawne but broke off their engagement due to his increasing ill health and lack of funds. In 1820 he moved to Italy where he died a year later of tuberculosis, the disease that claimed his mother and his brother Tom.