num_pages: 288
description: This is an entirely new selection of Keats's finest poetry containing all his best known work as well as a sample of less familiar pieces. Keats published three volumes of poetry before his death at age twenty-five of tuberculosis and while many of his contemporaries were prompt to recognize his greatness snobbery and political hostility led the Tory press to vilify and patronize him as a Cockney poet. Financial anxieties and the loss of those he loved most had tried him persistently yet he dismissed the concept of life as a vale of tears and substituted the concept of a vale of Soul-making. His poetry and his remarkable letters reveal a spirit of questing vitality and profound understanding and his final volume which contains the great odes and the unfinished Hyperion attests to an astonishing maturity of power.
language: English
title: Selected Poetry
publisher: Oxford University Press