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This selection first published in Penguin Classics 2009
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ISBN: 978-0-14-195972-6
Introduction by Jane Campion
LETTERS OF JOHN KEATS TO FANNY BRAWNE
I–IX: Shanklin, Winchester, Westminster
X – XXXII: Wentworth Place
XXXIII–XXXVII: Kentish Town – Preparing for Italy
POEMS
‘Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art’
The Eve of St Agnes
A Dream, after reading Dante’s Episode of Paolo and Francesca
La Belle Dame sans Merci. A Ballad
Ode to Psyche
Ode on Melancholy
Ode on Indolence
Lamia
‘The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!’
What can I do to drive away
‘I cry your mercy, pity, love – ay, love!’
To Fanny
‘This living hand, now warm and capable’
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines
ILLUSTRATIONS
Sketch of John Keats sleeping, 28 January 1821, by Joseph Severn
Silhouette of Fanny Brawne, after Augustin Edouart
Facsimilies of Keats’s handwriting, from his letters to Fanny
CLASSICSSO BRIGHT AND DELICATE
JOHN KEATS was born in October 1795, son of the manager of a livery stable in Moorfields. His father died in 1804 and his mother, of tuberculosis, in 1810. By then he had received a good education at John Clarke’s Enfield private school. In 1811 he was apprenticed to a surgeon, completing his professional training at Guy’s Hospital in 1816. His decision to commit himself to poetry rather than a medical career was a courageous one, based more on a challenge to himself than any actual achievement.
His genius was recognized and encouraged by early friends such as Charles Cowden Clarke and J. H. Reynolds, and in October 1816 he met Leigh Hunt, whose Examiner had already published Keats’s first poem. Only seven months later Poems (1817) appeared. Despite the high hopes of the Hunt circle, it was a failure. By the time Endymion was published in 1818 Keats’s name had been identified with Hunt’s ‘Cockney School’, and the Tory Blackwood’s Magazine delivered a violent attack on Keats as a lower-class vulgarian, with no right to aspire to ‘poetry’.
But for Keats fame lay not in contemporary literary politics but with posterity. Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth were his inspiration and challenge. The extraordinary speed with which Keats matured is evident from his letters. In 1818 he had worked on the powerful epic fragment Hyperion, and in 1819 he wrote ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, the major odes, Lamia, and the deeply exploratory Fall of Hyperion. Keats was already unwell when preparing the 1820 volume for the press; by the time it appeared in July he was desperately ill. He died in Rome in 1821.
Keats’s final volume did receive some contemporary critical recognition, but it was not until the latter part of the nineteenth century that his place in English Romanticism began to be recognized, and not until the twentieth century that it became fully recognized.
JANE CAMPION was born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1954. Her parents, Edith and Richard Campion, studied theatre at RADA and later formed the New Zealand Players with the idea of touring professional theatre throughout the country. Later they turned to farming on a mixed sheep and cattle property that ran from the main road north to the beach at Peka Peka.
Jane Campion studied Anthropology at Victoria University in Wellington and painting at both Chelsea School of Arts in London and Sydney College of Arts. While at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School she completed three short films, Peel, A Girl’s Own Story and Passionless Moments co-authored with Gerard Lee. Peel won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Sweetie, co-written by Gerard Lee, was her first feature film, followed by An Angel at My Table and The Piano, which won the Palme d’Or at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival, as well as eight Oscar nominations and three Oscars including Best Screenplay for Jane Campion in 1994. Subsequent films were Portrait of a Lady, Holy Smoke (co-written with Anna Campion and currently being adapted for the stage) and In the Cut.
Bright Star is the first film following Jane Campion’s four year break from 2003–2007 and has been written by her from an original idea. She is currently in development with 2B Films, Pathé and Screen Australia to make Runaway, an adaptation of an Alice Munro story.