The Texts of Keats’s Poems

by Jack Stillinger

Jack Stillinger's concern is with the words of Keats's “I wish,” he says, “to get rid of the wrong ones and to suggest how to go about constructing texts with a greater proportion of the right ones.” He finds that in the two best modern editions of Keats, one third of the texts have one or more wrong words. Modern editors have sometimes based their texts on inferior holograph, transcript, or printed versions; sometimes combined readings from separate versions; sometimes retained words added by copyists and early editors (who frequently made “improvements” when they thought the poems needed them); and sometimes, of course, introduced independent errors of their own.

The heart of this book is a systematic account of the textual history of each of the 150 poems that can reasonably be assigned to Keats. In each history Stillinger dates the work, as closely as it can be dated; gives the details of first publication; specifies the existing variant readings and their sources; and suggests what might be the basis for a standard text.

Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Jack Stillinger has been a member of the English faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 1958 and Center for Advanced Study Professor of English since 1970. He has published 26 books (monographs, textual studies, scholarly editions) and numerous articles and reviews, mainly on nineteenth-century British literature.

Stillinger has held fellowships and awards from, among others, the Woodrow Wilson and Guggenheim foundations, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities and was the 1986 recipient of the Keats-Shelley Association's Distinguished Scholar Award. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.