John Keats

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the short life and lasting works of Keats (1795-1821), who in one year wrote some of the most loved poems in English. Among these are Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn and Ode on Melancholy. That most productive year began in autumn 1818, when Keats had been stung by some reviews labelling him an uncouth Cockney who should go back to his former work as an apothecary, work he had left for poetry only two years before with the encouragement of enthusiastic friends. Just over two years later, Keats was dead in Rome from tuberculosis, before his work found fame, though some who knew him, including Shelley, believed his true killer was the critics.

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Guests

• Fiona Stafford 3 episodes
  Professor of English Language and Literature and Tutorial Fellow at Somerville College, University of Oxford
• Nicholas Roe 2 episodes
  Wardlaw Professor of English Literature at the University of St Andrews
• Meiko O'Halloran No other episodes
  Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature at Newcastle University

Reading list

• John Keats
  John Barnard (Cambridge University Press, 1987)
• John Keats and Romantic Scotland
  Katie Garner and Nicholas Roe (eds) (Oxford University Press, 2022)
• Keats and the Mirror of Art
  Ian Jack (Oxford University Press, 1967)
• John Keats: Selected Writings
  John Keats (ed. John Barnard) (Oxford University Press, 2020)
• John Keats: Oxford 21st-Century Authors
  John Keats (ed. John Barnard) (University Press, 2017)
• Selected Poems
  John Keats (ed. John Barnard) (Penguin, 2007)
• The Complete Poems
  John Keats (ed. John Barnard) (Penguin, 1977)
• Keats's Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition
  John Keats (ed. Jeffrey N. Cox) (W. W. Norton & Company, 2008)
• Walking North with Keats
  Carol Kyros Walker (Edinburgh University Press, 2021)
• Keats's Places
  Richard Marggraf Turley (ed.) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
• Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph
  Lucasta Miller (Jonathan Cape, 2021)
• John Keats in Context
  Michael O'Neill (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
• Keats and Embarrassment
  Christopher Ricks (Oxford University Press, 1974)
• John Keats: A New Life
  Nicholas Roe (Yale University Press, 2012)
• The Odes of Keats
  Helen Vendler (Belknap Press, 2004)
• Reading John Keats
  Susan J. Wolfson (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
• The Cambridge Companion to Keats
  Susan J. Wolfson (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2001)

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Programme ID: m002rgh3

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002rgh3

Auto-category: 821.7 (English poetry - 19th century)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. In 1819 John Keats wrote some of the most loved poems in English, among them Odes to a Nightingale and On Melancholy.