In 1848 Richard Monckton Milnes added a substantial body of short poems to the canon in his Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats, and eight years later published The Fall of Hyperion in Biographical and Historical Miscellanies of the Philobiblon Society. Since then some forty-odd poems, including thirteen sonnets and a high proportion of trivia, have been found, mostly in Keats’s letters.

Jack Stillinger’s The Poems of John Keats (Cambridge, Mass., 1978) and his The Text of Keats’s Poems (Cambridge, Mass., 1974) now give the fullest available account of Keats’s text, and are based on a comparison of the printed texts with the wealth of manuscript material, now mainly in American libraries. This edition was originally based on the editorial work of H. W. Garrod’s The Poetical Works of John Keats (Oxford, 1939, rev. edn 1958). However, H. E. Rollins’s edition of the letters, Robert Gittings, Alvin Whitley, Miriam Allott and Jack Stillinger had earlier noted various corrections needed in Garrod’s text and apparatus. Indeed, Garrod’s later Oxford Standard Authors text (1956) differs in many important ways from his definitive edition, sometimes providing better readings. Apart from the ‘Critical Notes’ (largely concerned with textual matters) in his Oxford Standard Authors edition, Garrod gave no explanatory notes. Until the publication of Miriam Allott’s The Poems of John Keats (1970), the only complete annotated text was E. De Selincourt’s Poems (1905, 5th rev. edn 1926), which is still useful. Professor Allott’s chronologically ordered text is modernized, and based on a re-examination of the manuscripts. Her full and invaluable notes include a generous selection of Keats’s early drafts and incorporate many of the findings of recent scholarship.

This edition is more modest. It is squarely based on the work of previous editors revised against Stillinger’s findings, and has involved no independent study of the manuscripts, though published facsimilies of some of the autograph drafts of poems have been consulted, and Dr W. H. Bond kindly checked a number of small points in the Harvard collection of Keats’s manuscripts. Where possible, the text follows that of the three editions overseen by Keats (1817, Endymion and 1820). Poems first published in R. M. Milnes’s Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats (1848) are sometimes based on the text which Milnes prepared with access to much of the manuscript material, though Keats’s manuscripts and the transcripts made by his friends have been used wherever their readings give a more accurate record of the poet’s intentions. The Fall of Hyperion was first published by Milnes in 1856–7, but he allowed himself greater editorial freedom than he had with 1848, and so the text below follows Woodhouse’s transcript. The remaining poems are based on the texts subsequently printed from various manuscript sources by such editors as H. B. Forman, C. L. Finney, Amy Lowell and H. W.