The Complete Poems

John Keats died at twenty-five. In the five years of his productive writing life, he produced a body of poetry that has never been surpassed for its combination of sensuous beauty, philosophical depth, and formal perfection. The great odes alone — ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, ‘To Autumn’, ‘Ode on Melancholy’ — would secure his place among the greatest poets who ever lived in English.

This Penguin Classics complete edition, edited by John Barnard with full scholarly apparatus, presents every poem Keats ever wrote — from the early apprentice work that shows a young poet discovering his gifts to the Hyperion fragments that suggest the epic poet he might have become, and the matchless final lyrics that he wrote while dying. Nothing is left out. Everything is annotated and contextualised.

To read Keats entire is to experience the full arc of a brief, brilliant, heartbreaking career — and to understand why his work has remained, for two hundred years, the most loved poetry in the English language. An essential edition for any serious reader. Published by Penguin Classics.