This comprehensive guide to the poetry and letters of John Keats offers a highly readable and detailed textual analysis of the themes and techniques of his work. Blades assesses all the major writing - including the narratives and the great odes - and goes on to examine the context of the verse through a survey of the poet's letters and an examination of the key features of nineteenth century Romanticism. This lively and imaginative study concludes with a discussion of some of the most influential critical responses to Keats's work.

In this lively and stimulating study, detailed analysis of the poems is closely grounded in the literary and historical contexts in which Lyrical Ballads was first conceived, realized and subsequently expanded into two volumes. Documenting the revisions of the early edition, John Blades carefully reassesses the poems in the light of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's literary theories, and then broadens the discussion by tracing the critical history of Lyrical Ballads over the two centuries since its first publication.

This essential study takes a fresh look at The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, Cymbeline and Pericles. Part I uses carefully selected short extracts for close textual analysis, while Part II examines the contexts and key criticism. The volume is an ideal introductory guide for those who are studying Shakespeare's late plays for the first time.