#000571
Complete Poems of Keats and Shelley (Modern Library)
John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley
This Modern Library omnibus gathers the poems of the two youngest and most luminous of the English Romantics into a single volume—Keats's odes and great fragments beside Shelley's lyrics, political fire, and long visionary poems. The pairing is natural: linked by reputation more than intimacy, both dead young and both buried in Rome, they represent the second Romantic generation at its most intense. Keats offers sensuous exactness and the odes that anchor the English canon; Shelley offers speed, argument, and a radical's hunger for transformation. Having both between one set of covers lets a reader feel the contrast—Keats's ripe stillness against Shelley's rushing air—and makes a durable, inexpensive keystone for a poetry shelf.
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The authors
John Keats (1795–1821), trained as an apothecary-surgeon, wrote nearly all his major work in a single astonishing year before dying of tuberculosis in Rome at twenty-five. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), Eton- and Oxford-educated and expelled for atheism, was a political radical and idealist who drowned off the Italian coast at twenty-nine. They knew each other; Shelley's Adonais is an elegy for Keats.
The book
The volume collects Keats's odes, The Eve of St. Agnes, Hyperion, and the sonnets, alongside Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Adonais, The Mask of Anarchy, Ode to the West Wind, and the shorter lyrics. It is a reading text rather than a scholarly edition—no heavy apparatus, just the poems.
How it reads
These remain foundational. Keats's phrase-making ("tender is the night," "a thing of beauty") saturates the language; Shelley's politics and prosody feel newly alive to each generation. A reader wanting variants and full annotation will still reach for the Stillinger or Reiman scholarly editions, but for reading, this is ideal.
For more context
Read alongside Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads for the first Romantic generation, and Byron for the third point of the triangle.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Publisher
- Modern Library
- Place of publication
- New York
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Poetry
- Location
- Colorado
Places