For instance, the early poetry’s frequent catalogues usually block off the main object described with a colon, and then use semi-colons to separate each individual item. This device allows for a combination of due emphasis upon detail, while giving that sense of an excited onward rush so typical of Keats’s first phase. The colon, semi-colon, dash and exclamation mark are all used to maintain a feeling of forward movement in passages which might, if punctuated by modern rules, break up into a series of phrases verging on the exclamatory (particularly in Endymion, where description in any case overwhelms narrative drive). These effects seem worth preserving, though I have freely re-punctuated where there is a danger of obscurity. Where Keats punctuates twice over (as ’, – ’) I have frequently chosen one of the alternatives offered. The use of a dash for emphasis has usually been retained, and the colon, which sometimes represents a full stop or a dash, has been replaced with alternative pointing where necessary. Keats’s frequent creation of hyphenated words was not always properly marked in the early editions, and hyphens have been added throughout. Spelling is normally regularized, though in the case of Keats’s inconsistent spelling of ‘fairy’/‘faery’ I follow whichever seems the preferred spelling in an individual poem, since the latter spelling seems to have held a deliberately archaic flavour for him. The spelling ‘aye’ is used when the meaning is ‘ever’, and ‘ay’ when the sense is ‘ah!’ or ‘yes’. In dealing with R. M. Milnes’s 1848 text, the same conservative attitude to punctuation has been adopted: Keats’s manuscripts are of little help, and Milnes went over the text carefully, pointing in basically the same style as Keats’s publishers. Those texts based on Keats’s manuscripts alone have been punctuated according to modern practice.

Appendixes comprise two important passages from Wordsworth and Hazlitt which affected Keats’s attitude to mythology, Keats’s two prefaces to Endymion, the publisher’s advertisement for 1820, the order of poems in 1817 and 1820, Keats’s notes on Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Keats’s account of Kean’s Shakespearian acting (this item is included because, though often referred to, it is not easily available).

Note to the Third Edition

In 1976 I was able to revise this edition against the findings of Jack Stillinger’s The Texts of Keats’s Poems (1974). Many substantive corrections were made on the basis of his study of the texts’ transmission. Where possible, acknowledgements are made in the notes. Two years later, Stillinger published his edition, Poems of John Keats, which included some new evidence and provided details of the manuscript readings which superseded Garrod’s work. I have taken this opportunity to correct some minor errors in the text, and to check the wording of the selections given from Keats’s drafts. In the event, Stillinger’s edition followed the published version of The Eve of St Agnes, and not one containing the alterations Keats wished to make in September 1819, for which he had earlier argued. On occasions my decisions elsewhere part company with Professor Stillinger’s.

The canon was little affected. To Woman (from the Greek) was excluded since it is not by Keats (see Garrod, p. x), but there was insufficient room to add Love and Folly, which has been attributed to Keats and Charles Brown (first printed by Walter E. Peck in Notes and Queries, 25 February 1939). Stillinger believes that ‘Can death be sleep’, Sonnet to A[ubrey] G[eorge] S[pencer], and ‘ “The House of Mourning” written by Mr. Scott’ should be regarded as doubtful attributions. Following Stillinger, ‘Gifye wol stonden hardie wight’ is treated as a separate fragment, and not as part of the Eve of St Mark (Garrod, Allott).

I now think that the ‘Bright star!’ sonnet belongs not with the distraught poems written to Fanny Brawne in late 1819 or early in 1820, but to an earlier period, probably July 1819.

The opportunity has been taken to add a selection of Keats’s letters which deal with his ideas of poetry and the imagination. Where possible whole letters have been given.

August 1987

Acknowledgements

My deepest debt, and one apparent throughout the text and notes, is to the previous editors of Keats’s poems, and to the commentaries of E. De Selincourt and Professor Allott. Any editor of Keats is dependent upon the patient explorations begun by Keats’s friends, Woodhouse, Clarke and Brown, and continued by several generations of critics. Among the names, those of E. De Selincourt, J.