A Greeting of the Spirit: Selected Poetry of John Keats with Commentaries

by Susan J. Wolfson

A renowned Keats scholar illuminates the poet's extraordinary career, in a new edition featuring seventy-eight verse selections with commentary.



John Keats's career as a published poet spanned scarcely more than four years, cut short by his death early in 1821 at age twenty-five. Yet in this time, he produced a remarkable--and remarkably wide-ranging--body of work that has secured his place as one of the most influential poets in the British literary tradition. Celebrated Keats scholar Susan J. Wolfson presents seventy-eight selections from his work, each accompanied by a commentary on its form, style, meanings, and relevant contexts.

In this edition, readers will rediscover a virtuoso poet, by turns lively, experimental, self-ironizing, outrageous, and philosophical. Wolfson includes such well-known favorites as Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, La Belle Dame sans Merci, and The Eve of St. Agnes, as well as less familiar poems, several in letters to family and friends never meant for publication. Her selections redefine the breadth and depth of Keats's poetic imagination, from intellectual jests and satires to erotic bandying, passionate confessions, and reflections on mortality.

The selections, presented in their order of composition, convey a chronicle of Keats's artistic and personal evolution. Wolfson's revealing commentaries unfold the lively complexities of his verbal arts and stylistic experiments, his earnest goals and nervous apprehensions, and the pressures of politics and literary criticism in his day. In critically attentive and conversational prose, Wolfson encourages us to experience Keats in the way that he himself imagined the language of poetry: as a living event, a cooperative experience shared between author and reader.

Genres: Poetry

480 pages, Hardcover

Published October 31, 2022

Reviews

[Fitch Perkins]

I wanted to finish this before going to Rome and I did! I don’t think I can give it a rating though because I feel like I took the wrong approach by reading it cover to cover. She is such a brilliant writer and no doubt a great professor and sometimes I felt like I was too dumb to understand what she was saying about the poems. Like I almost needed a commentary for the commentary. But I think if I had taken my time and read little part thoroughly and more than once I would have understood more. I think jumping around to specific poems that I wanted to read about instead of trying to finish the whole thing would have been helpful for this. He was only 25 when he died and we’re still talking about him 200 years later so that’s made me feel bad about myself 😃

[Élie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Je m'avoue vaincu, après plusieurs années à essayer. Les poèmes de Keats sont magnifiques, là n'est pas la question. Le commentaire en revanche est d'un niveau consternant et très peu organisé. Les éléments biographiques sont peu clairs et le commentaire littéraire médiocre, reposant surtout sur des rapprochements phonétiques à la signification douteuse. Je ne sais pas pourquoi une université aussi prestigieuse a accepté de publier ce livre. Sans doute sur la réputation de l'auteur uniquement. Autant lire une anthologie des poèmes de Keats avec moins de bêtises et un prix plus raisonnable.

[Jacky Chan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Keats' poetry is possibly one of the easiest of which to produce illuminating commentaries and close readings, but Susan Wolfson's efforts here just fall short: they turn the poet's work into hermeneutically self-contained riddles where sound dominates sense. I don't doubt that Keats was very much interested in verbal and sonic effects, but he was interested in so much more.