This significant biography of the poet John Keats (1795—1821), is part of the highly respected series. Keats is best known for his six great odes, and although his poems were not well received during his lifetime, they are now considered among the finest in the English language.

'I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death,' John Keats soberly prophesied in 1818 as he started writing the blankverse epic Hyperion. Today he endures as the archetypal Romantic genius who explored the limits of the imagination and celebrated the pleasures of the senses but suffered a tragic early death. Edmund Wilson counted him as 'one of the half dozen greatest English writers,' and T. S. Eliot has paid tribute to the Shakespearean...

An authoritative biography of Geoffrey Chaucer, the greatest medieval English poet, this volume is a remarkable portrait of the poet and the events that shaped him. Legouis examines Chaucer's life, the relationship of his work to his times, it also studies the sources and composition of Chaucer's masterpiece “The Canterbury Tales”.

In this 1879 addition to the English Men of Letters series, Pattison explores the life and work of John Milton, the author of the definitive Paradise Lost. The volume touches on Milton's pamphlets, famous works of poetry, and even his religious beliefs. Pattison judges only Shakespeare to be Milton's superior in the realm of English poetry.

"An innovative and elegant new biography of John Milton from an acclaimed Oxford professor. John Milton was once essential reading for visionaries and revolutionaries, from William Blake to Ben Franklin. Now, however, he has become a literary institution--intimidating rather than inspiring. In Making Darkness Light, Oxford professor Joe Moshenska rediscovers a poet whose rich contradictions confound his monumental image. Immersing ourselves in the...

Endowed with a surfeit of imagination and creativity, Coleridge endlessly revised his poetry, changing passages, adding new lines, and even writing several variations of the same poem. Faced with the challenge of putting together an authoritative collection, William Keach presents the final texts of all the poems published during Coleridge's lifetime and a substantial selection from the verse still in manuscript at his death, together with comprehensive,...

Forever England explores Rupert Brooke's life, from schooldays to the Great War, and in so doing builds a remarkable picture of a long-lost England and a generation's descent into war. Brooke's poems emerge dramatically from a tangled web of love, friendship, mental illness and politics. He reveals also the existence of a previously unrecorded love child from a South Seas romance. The WW1 legend was largely brought about by the words of one of his...

"The first biography of Thom Gunn, a poet who could "give the dead a voice, make them sing" (Hilton Als, The New Yorker )"--

"For many, William Wordsworth personifies the Age of Romanticism. The Prelude, his masterpiece, is one of the finest poems in the English language, and the Lyrical Ballads, written with his friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is a defining text of the Romantic movement. This new selection of his poetry, prepared by his biographer Stephen Gill and the Wordsworth scholar Duncan Wu from Gill's authoritative Oxford Authors edition, offers...

"In the early 1800s, poetry could land a person in jail. Those who tried to change the world through their poems risked notoriety, or courted it. Among the most subversive were a group of young writers known as the Romantics: Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and John Keats. These rebels believed poetry should express strong feelings in ordinary language. And they were barely out of their teens when their...