Keats: Poems Published in 1820

These are the poems Keats wrote knowing he was dying. In 1820, tuberculosis had already claimed his brother Tom; it would take Keats by the following winter at twenty-five. Yet this collection contains the greatest odes in English poetry: "Ode to a Nightingale," "On a Grecian Urn," "On Melancholy," "On Indolence" - each a meditation on beauty, mortality, and the unbearable tension between the immortal and the fleeting. Here too are "Lamia," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," poems where romance curdles into nightmare and desire becomes indistinguishable from death. Keats believed "a Poet is the most unpoetical of all creatures" because he had no identity - he could become a nightingale, an urn, a lover frozen at the moment of bliss. His genius was feeling everything too completely and transmuting that feeling into language that still makes readers catch their breath two centuries later. This is the book that contains "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" - and proves it.