Books

Books : reviews

H. W. Garrod.
Keats poetical works.
OUP. 1956

This edition by H. W. Garrod includes every poem, verse drama, and fragment known to have been written by Keats. Based on careful study of the manuscript sources, it offers the student and general reader an authoritative plain text. It also contains a commentary by Buxton Forman on the early printed editions, a chronology of Keats’s life, and a note on the wealth of manuscript material which enables us to see, more clearly than in the case of almost any other English poet, the gropings and agonies through which great poetry comes to truth.

An appendix contains Keats’s little known fragment ‘Gripus’, from Richard Woodhouse’s book of transcripts in the Pierpont Morgan Library, and a final section of Critical Notes provides a lively commentary on certain textual problems, such as the genesis of the first line of ‘Endymion’ and the cancelled stanza of the ‘Ode on Melancholy’.