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.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

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

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Programme ID: m002rgh3

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

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