The Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821, Volumes 1 and 2

For many years one of the most serious needs in the literary world has been for a definitive edition of the letters of John Keats. Now one of the world’s foremost Keats authorities, Hyder Edward Rollins of Harvard, has prepared a completely new edition of all the extant letters, with an extensive listing of the letters presumed missing.

With impeccable scholarship and total faithfulness to the originals, Professor Rollins here is able to redate and rearrange sixty of the letters. Through full documentation for each letter, understanding of the content is considerably amplified both through the correction of errors, and through application of the results of the editor’s life-long study of Keats and his work. In addition to many letters from Keats’s relatives and friends, the present work includes seven letters or other documents signed or written by Keats that appear in no English edition, and also new texts of seven other letters by the poet. Furthermore, all the letters known only in Woodhouse’s transcripts and in Jeffrey’s transcripts are here printed for the first time exactly as Woodhouse and Jeffrey copied them.

The letters of Joseph Severn describing the last illness and death of Keats are given in their entirety. These letters are invaluable historically and biographically, and are also exceptionally good reading.