K eats, J ohn, P oetry

Abstract

John Keats (1795–1821), long considered a major poet of the Romantic period, experimented with a variety of genres during his brief career. Those for which he is best known are the ode, sonnet, romance, ballad, and two unfinished epics (‘Hyperion’ and ‘The Fall of Hyperion’), which can be classified as Romantic fragment poems. The three volumes Keats published in his lifetime make clear that distinctions among genres were important to him. His 1817 Poems is divided into sections labelled ‘Poems’, ‘Epistles’, and ‘Sonnets’. The book also distinguishes between long and short poems in that it begins and ends with the longest works in the collection, ‘I stood tip‐toe upon a little hill’ and ‘Sleep and Poetry’, respectively. Keats's second publication, Endymion (1818), declares its genre in its subtitle, ‘A Poetic Romance’, and his final 1820 volume, like his first, begins and ends with his longest works (the narrative poems ‘Lamia,” Isabella’, and ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ at the beginning and the epic fragment ‘Hyperion’ at the end), that enclose a middle section of shorter pieces labelled ‘Poems’.