This book begins with an account of the disease that killed Keats and contributed to the enduring myth that he was a doomed genius. Newspaper reports of Keats's death and early 'tribute' poems marking his demise form the substance of successive chapters, as do early attempts at researching and writing a biography of him. Keats's would-be biographers included his publisher John Taylor whose biographical endeavours preceded Keats's death, his mentor Leigh Hunt who devoted a chapter to 'Mr. K...

This landmark biography of celebrated Romantic poet John Keats explodes entrenched conceptions of him as a delicate, overly sensitive, tragic figure. Instead, Nicholas Roe reveals the real flesh-and-blood poet: a passionate man driven by ambition but prey to doubt, suspicion, and jealousy; sure of his vocation while bitterly resentful of the obstacles that blighted his career; devoured by sexual desire and frustration; and in thrall to alcohol and opium. Through unparalleled original resea...

This book begins with an account of the disease that killed Keats and contributed to the enduring myth that he was a doomed genius. Newspaper reports of Keats's death and early 'tribute' poems marking his demise form the substance of successive chapters, as do early attempts at researching and writing a biography of him. Keats's would-be biographers included his publisher John Taylor whose biographical endeavours preceded Keats's death, his mentor Leigh Hunt who devoted a chapter to 'Mr. K...

Between 22 June and 18 August 1818, John Keats and his friend and collaborator Charles Armitage Brown embarked on an epic walking tour of the English Lake District, South West Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Ayrshire Burns Country, the Scottish Highlands and Western Isles, and the Great Glen north eastwards to Inverness, Beauly, the Black Isle, and Cromarty. During the tour, Keats and Brown both wrote extensive and detailed accounts of their experiences. The twelve new essays in this colle...

This volume offers a reappraisal of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's radical careers before their emergence as major poets. Updated, revised, and with new manuscript material, this expanded new edition responds to the most significant critical work on Wordsworth's and Coleridge's radical careers in the three decades since the book first appeared. Fresh material is drawn from newspapers and printed sources; the poetry of 1798 is given more detailed attention, and the critical debate surrounding...

This landmark biography of celebrated Romantic poet John Keats explodes entrenched conceptions of him as a delicate, overly sensitive, tragic figure. Instead, Nicholas Roe reveals the real flesh-and-blood poet: a passionate man driven by ambition but prey to doubt, suspicion, and jealousy; sure of his vocation while bitterly resentful of the obstacles that blighted his career; devoured by sexual desire and frustration; and in thrall to alcohol and opium. Through unparalleled original resea...

Leigh Hunt is the forgotten giant of English Romanticism. The man Virginia Woolf called the 'spiritual grandfather' of the modern world was descended from black Caribbeans and grew up a child of the American and French revolutions. A poet and radical journalist, he threw off the shackles of the old order and campaigned tirelessly for Irish freedom and the abolition of slavery. Unwilling to see the Prince of Wales as an 'Adonis of Loveliness', Hunt was jailed for 'diabolical libel' that pre...

This book presents ten new chapters on John Keats's medical imagination, beginning with his practical engagement with dissection and surgery, and the extraordinary poems he wrote during his 'busy time' at Guy's Hospital 1815-17. The Physical Society at Guy's and the demands of a medical career are explored, as are the lyrical spheres of botany, melancholia, and Keats's strange oxymoronic poetics of suspended animation. Here too are links between surveillance of patients at Bedlam and of in...

Recent critical and scholarly interest in John Keats has encouraged a resurgence of interest in his friend and mentor, the poet and journalist Leigh Hunt. This timely collection of essays by leading British and North America romanticists explores Hunt's life, writings and cultural significance over the full length of his career, arguing for the recognition of Hunt's importance to British intellectual and literary culture in the Romantic period.

This book offers a comprehensive, readable and authoritative introduction to the study of Shakespeare, by means of nineteen newly commissioned essays. An international team of prominent scholars provide a broadly cultural approach to the chief literary, performative and historical aspects of Shakespeare's work. They bring the latest scholarship to bear on traditional subjects of Shakespeare study, such as biography, the transmission of the texts, the main dramatic and poetic genres, the st...

In this historical tour de force, now available in B-format paperback, Roy Porter takes a critical look at representations of the body in health, disease and death in Britain from the mid-seventeenth to the twentieth century. Porter argues that great symbolic weight was attached to contrasting conceptions of the healthy and diseased body, and that such ideas were mapped onto antithetical notions of the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. With these images in mind, he explores asp...

Victorian poetry was read and enjoyed by a much larger audience than is sometimes thought. Publication in widely-circulating periodicals, reprinting in book reviews, and excerpting in novels and essays ensured that major poets such as Tennyson, Browning, Hardy and Rossetti were household names, and they remain popular today. The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry provides an accessible overview of British poetry from 1830 to 1901, paying particular attention to its role in mass med...