John Barnard... has in this latest edition managed triumphantly to reshape significantly our understanding of Keats's writings.... The volume is an editorial tour-de-force that breathes revivifying energy into our grasp of Keats's writings as it 'creates' what the editor calls 'a double time scheme', placing 'the poetry by which Keats was known to the reading public in his lifetime within the extensive biographical context provided by his unpublished poems and
letters' (xxxv-xxxvi). It is an editorial achievement of the first importance.
John Barnard was Professor of English Literature at the University of Leeds, 1978-2001, and is a Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, University of London. He has written extensively on seventeenth century literature, Dryden, the second generation Romantics, and book history, and has published editions of John Keats (Penguin Classics, 1973, etc.), William Congreve (1972), and Sir George Etherege (1979), and edited the Critical Heritage Pope
(1973). His study of Keats was published by Cambridge University Press in 1987. From 1975 to 2010 he was General Editor of Longman Annotated Poets. He edited The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume IV, 1557-1695 (2002) with D. F. McKenzie, and published John Keats: Selected Letters in
2014.