The 64 Sonnets

by John Keats, Edward Hirsch (Introduction)

John Keats is among the greatest English poets. (He himself imagined he would be counted so!) For some readers, his odes define the essence of poetry. We also discover in Keats a great composer of sonnets. Here, for the first time published in a separate edition, are all sixty-four sonnets, the first written when Keats was eighteen, the last just five years later. Reading these poems, you'll experience the wonder of Keats's growing poetic powers; you'll feel the "shock of recognition" when you come upon the great ones. Presented with an introduction by Edward Hirsch, and accompanying explanatory notes, the sonnets stand out as a triumph of their own. "Between 1814 and 1819, John Keats wrote sixty-four sonnets. He was eighteen years old when he composed his first sonnet; he was turning twenty-four when he completed his last one. He restlessly experimented with the fourteen-line form and used it to plunge into (and explore) his emotional depths. You can sit down and read these poems in a single night and have a complete Keatsian experience—he breathes close and offers himself to us; his presence is near. You can also read them throughout your adulthood and never really get to the bottom of them. These short, durable poems are filled with the mysteries of poetry. "In the sonnets, Keats conveys the range of his interests, his concerns, his attachments, his obsessions. Some are light and improvisatory, tossed off in fifteen minutes, a moment's thought. Some are polemics, or romantic period pieces; others are brooding testaments or compulsive outpourings, which seem to expand on the page. These sonnets are replete with a sensuous feeling for nature—'The poetry of earth is never dead'—that looks back to Wordsworth and forward to Frost. They also luxuriate in the spaces of imagination—'Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold'—and trigger the daydreaming capacities of the mind." —from the Introduction by Edward Hirsch Edward Hirsch has published six books of For the Sleepwalkers (1981), Wild Gratitude (1986), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Night Parade (1989), Earthly Measures (1994), On Love (1998), and Lay Back the Darkness (2003). He has also written three prose How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national bestseller, Responsive Reading (1999), and The Demon and the Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration (2002). He writes a weekly column on poetry for the Washington Post Book World . He has received the Prix de Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and a MacArthur Fellowship. He taught for eighteen years at the University of Houston, and is now the fourth president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Genres: Poetry

135 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2004

About the author

Rich melodic works in classical imagery of English poet John Keats include " The Eve of Saint Agnes ," " Ode on a Grecian Urn ," and " To Autumn ," all in 1819.

Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley include "Adonais," an elegy of 1821 to John Keats.

Work of the principal of the Romantic movement of England received constant critical attacks from the periodicals of the day during his short life. He nevertheless posthumously immensely influenced poets, such as Alfred Tennyson. Elaborate word choice and sensual imagery characterize poetry, including a series of odes, masterpieces of Keats among the most popular poems in English literature. Most celebrated letters of Keats expound on his aesthetic theory of "negative capability."

Wikipedia page of the author

Reviews

[Robin Helweg-Larsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The 64 extant sonnets of John Keats make for a very interesting read for anyone interested in formal verse. Not only do we have the poet developing his skills and expression in the last five years of his short life (he was 18 when he wrote his first sonnet, and died at 23), but he consciously experimented with the form, outlining in his letters the shortcomings that he saw in the Petrarchan and Shakespearean versions while he looked for a better structure.

This collection has a useful but insufficient introduction by Edward Hirsch and incompetent notes by Gary Hawkins. Hirsch writes of the development of Keats' themes, but fails to tie the poems into the details of his life. I suggest reading at least the Wikipedia entry on Keats to get a fuller sense of what was going on in his mind, his life, his environment.

The notes by Hawkins appear to have been thrown together without either care or insight. There is a facing page of three or four comments for each poem, and there is a further note on the rhyme scheme in an appendix at the back. The appendix catches four of the lengthened lines (6 or even 7 feet in a line) but misses three of them; and notes one of the shortened lines but misses another. Worse, the analysis of the rhyme scheme for the technically most interesting sonnet ("If by dull rhymes our English must be chain'd") fails to understand the structure Keats was creating, despite quoting his comments in the letter containing the poem. Hawkins gives the structure as
abc ad (d) c abc dede (tercets, quatrain)
This is wrong on so many levels... First, the fifth line's rhyme is b, not d. Second, there is no quatrain at all. Third, Keats has shown how to analyze the sonnet - which is a single sentence - by breaking it into tercets with the use of semicolons to clarify the structure of his thought. Its structure is
abc; abd; cab; cde; de.
That this doesn't fit into Hawkins categories of Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets is precisely the point Keats makes in his letter ("I have been endeavouring to discover a better sonnet stanza than we have") as well as in the sonnet itself ("Let us find out, if we must be constrain'd, / Sandals more interwoven and complete / To fit the naked foot of Poesy;")

Hawkins also makes errors of fact and interpretation in the notes facing the sonnets themselves. The very first sonnet, written in 1814, references "the triple kingdom" which Hawkins explains as "Great Britain, composed of England, Scotland and Wales." Wrong. With the Act of Union of 1801 the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland were united, as represented by the simultaneous creation of the Union Jack with its combination of the crosses of the three flags. Wales was not a kingdom but a principality, and its flag never figured in the larger national flags.

In the sonnet "How many bards gild the lapses of time!", Keats writes "A few of them have ever been the food / Of my delighted fancy." Hawkins annotates this as "namely, the epic poets Milton and Spenser." Oh really? How about Shakespeare, whom Keats addresses directly as "Chief Poet!" in another sonnet. And this is quite apart from sonnets addressed to Byron, Chatterton, Hunt, and Burns.

I have to smile at Hawkins' interpretation of "artless daughters":

Happy is England, sweet her artless daughters;
Enough their simple loveliness for me,
Enough their whitest arms in silence clinging:
Yet do I often warmly burn to see
Beauties of deeper glance, and hear their singing,
And float with them about the summer waters.

Hawkins interprets the "artless daughters" as "Scotland and Wales". Oh come on! Keats could fall in love at a girl's glance, at a stranger pulling off a glove. I don't think he meant Scotland and Wales - he meant girls, classic "English rose" girls, and contrasted them with what he might find in the Mediterranean. Where he went, and died.

Few of the sonnets are near as memorable as "On first looking into Chapman's Homer" or "When I have fears that I may cease to be", but they are all readable and rereadable, and to have them as this collection is a treat.

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nature withheld Cassandra in the skies
For meet adornment a full thousand years;
She took their cream of beauty, fairest dyes,
And shaped and tinted her above all peers.
Love meanwhile held her dearly with his wings,
And underneath their shadow charm'd her eyes
To such a richness, that the cloudy kings
Of high Olympus utter'd slavish sighs.
When I beheld her on the earth descend,
My heart began to burn—and only pains,
They were my pleasures, they my sad life's end;
Love pour'd her beauty into my warm veins.

[Nate Hansen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Keats was a poetic genius. Unfortunately, he spent the greater part of that genius in talking about himself -- the art in this book is a mirror. When it's held up to the world, it's unbeatably beautiful. When it's turned on Keats, we find a young man overwhelmingly taken with the beauty of his own spirit, which does not make for edifying reading.

[Javiilicitano · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was really inspirational reading about this English poet, how he overcame every setback that occur to him in his short life. It´s a shame he died so young, he could have been so much better with a little bit more of time.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm reading Keats to study the form.

[Lindsay · Rating 3 out of 5]

commentary on the other half of the page is so helpful. poems lean generic/boring at times