Today, at a garage sale, I came across the out-of-print Signet classic edition of The Selected Poetry of Keats. I love these particular editions because they're unassuming, inexpensive, and easy to carry around. Also, they usually come with a pretty good introduction. This one is by Paul De Man, from whom I took a class on "Reading and Rhetorical Structures" while at Yale. He was an almost mythical figure for me because he had once met Maurice Blanchot, a writer I idolized.
The Signet classic series is edited by John Hollander, another Yale Professor whom I once took a class from, and whose tour-de-force form-and-content-are-one Rhyme's Reason is a description of every English verse form in the style of that particular verse form.
In college, I always preferred Shelley to Keats. One summer, I walked from Genoa to La Spezia (a three day journey) to make a pilgramage of sorts to the Bay of Lerici where Shelley drowned at the age of 29 (and where Lord Byron used to swim across the rather formidable bay - in the dark! - for nightly trysts with his secret paramour).
Years later, in Rome, I accidentally stumbled upon the house that Keats died in at the age of 25, and I became a bit more interested in him as a result. A few years later, I came across a recording of F. Scott Fitzgerald (who I love) reciting a poem by Keats (his favorite poet), and my esteem for him went up a notch. And then recently, I decided to memorize Keats' "When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be" (to alleviate the tedium of swimming laps in the pool at the local gym) and I was hooked after that.
In short, I was very happy to find this book today, and am very much looking forward to getting to know the poems a little better.
John Keatsposted by Caveh Zahedi at
11:49 PM
